Optimal Team Contracts.

In this paper, the authors evaluate certain challenges put forth by Mukesh Eswaran and Ashok Kotwal (1984) and Eric Rasmusen (1987) concerning the legitimacy of Bengt Holmstrom's (1982) proposed solution for the problem of moral hazard in teams. They demonstrate that the argument put forth by Rasmusen hinges on some rather extreme conditions concerning the verifiability of individual actions relating to renegotiation attempts; relaxing these conditions renders efficient budget-balancing contracts infeasible, as argued by Holmstrom. Second, the authors demonstrate that the criticism put forth by Eswaran and Kotwal is invalid, at least if one insists that clandestine deals must satisfy the same incentive-compatibility conditions required of the principal-agent contract proposed by Holmstrom.