Optimal Contracts with Fairness Concerns

In an organization, the principal may care about both efficiency and fairness. In this paper, we study the optimal contracts between a principal and multiple agents when the principal favors a more even expost wage distribution. We characterize the principal’s fairness concern by a convex shading cost function and it is shown that the optimal contract is either a fixed wage contract or an incentive contract. Moreover, interior solution exists under certain conditions where the principal would provide both fixed and incentive contracts to agents. We also show that the optimal contracts tend to be more hybrid if the shading cost becomes more convex and the fraction of the incentive contract would decrease as the principal cares more about fairness