Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP4870
Authors: Ricardo Alonso; Niko Matouschek
Abstract: We explore the optimal delegation of decision rights by a principal to a better informed but biased agent. In an infinitely repeated game a long-lived principal faces a series of short-lived agents. Every period they play a cheap talk game a la Crawford and Sobel (1982) with constant bias, quadratic loss functions and general distributions of the state of the world. We characterize the optimal delegation schemes for all discount rates and show that they resemble organizational arrangements that are commonly observed, including centralization and threshold delegation. For small biases threshold delegation is optimal for almost all distributions. Outsourcing can only be optimal if the principal is sufficiently impatient.
Keywords: cheap talk; delegation; relational contract
JEL Codes: D23; D82; L23
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| bias of agents (D82) | optimal delegation scheme (D72) |
| principal's commitment power (M54) | optimal delegation scheme (D72) |
| degree of bias (C46) | efficiency of delegation method (H21) |
| high relational capital (O36) | threshold delegation preferred (Y60) |
| low relational capital (D29) | menu delegation optimal (D79) |
| large bias + unfavorable state distribution (C46) | centralization optimal (H77) |