Contracts with Inspections (2402.16553v1)

Abstract: In the classical principal-agent hidden-action model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent for which he can choose among actions with different costs and different success probabilities to accomplish the task. To incentivize the agent to exert effort, the principal can commit to a contract, which is the amount of payment based on the task's success. A crucial assumption of this model is that the principal can only base the payment on the outcome but not on the agent's chosen action. In this work, we relax the hidden-action assumption and introduce a new model where the principal is allowed to inspect subsets of actions at some cost that depends on the inspected subset. If the principal discovers that the agent did not select the agreed-upon action through the inspection, the principal can withhold payment. This relaxation of the model introduces a broader strategy space for the principal, who now faces a tradeoff between positive incentives (increasing payment) and negative incentives (increasing inspection). We show how to find the best deterministic incentive-compatible inspection scheme for all monotone inspection cost functions. We then turn to randomized inspection schemes and show that one can efficiently find the best randomized incentive-compatible inspection scheme when the inspection cost function is submodular. We complement this result by showing that it is impossible to efficiently find the optimal randomized inspection scheme for the more general case of XOS inspection cost functions.