On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
We consider a principal-agent model with moral hazard, bilateral risk-neutrality, and limited liability. The principal knows only some of the actions the agent can take and evaluates contracts by their guaranteed payoff over possible unknown actions. We show that linear contracts are a robustly optimal way to incentivize the agent: any randomization over contracts can be improved by making each contract in its support linear. We then identify an optimal random linear contract characterized by a single parameter that bounds its continuous support. Several corollaries arise: the gain from randomization can be arbitrarily large; optimal randomization does not require commitment; and screening cannot improve the principal’s guarantee.
