团队

Problem definition: Internal theft poses a significant challenge in retail firms’ operations. Owing to a lack of effective monitoring tools, a firm cannot observe every action in daily operations of its employees, providing opportunity for wrongdoing, such as capacity and cash stealing. As a result, a common practice is to increase the price of goods to offset the loss in revenue due to the increasing threat of theft. However, we show that such practices are not optimal. Methodology/results: We model the internal theft problem in retailing as a principal-agent model, where the principal (firm) contracts an agent (retail manager) for capacity planning and daily sales. The agent is subject to moral hazard and may steal the capacity (procurement budget or company asset) before demand realization (ex ante stealing) or steal the sales revenue after demand realization (ex post stealing). We solve for the optimal capacity, price, and agent’s commission decisions to maximize the principal’s utility. We find that capacity and price decisions are not monotone in terms of the severity of moral hazards. In particular, the principal should first decrease and then increase (increase and then decrease) the price (the capacity) when ex post stealing becomes more prevalent. We also provide an optimal commission scheme to the agent, which is simple and can be easily implemented. Finally, we investigate the sensitivities of price and capacity decisions to demand uncertainties in the presence of moral hazard. Managerial implications: Simply increasing retail prices and shifting the margin to consumers to combat loss in revenue caused by internal theft can amplify the agency problem in some scenarios because it leads to a significant loss in demand and insufficient commission to the agent. Retail firms should instead focus on jointly optimizing capacity and price and providing their employees with appropriate commissions.

We consider a stylized incentive management problem over an infinite time horizon, where the principal hires an agent to provide services to customers. Customers request service in one of two ways: either via an online or a traditional offline channel. The principal does not observe the offline customers’ arrivals, nor does she observe whether the agent exerts (costly) effort that can increase the arrival rate of customers. This creates an opportunity for the agent (i) to divert cash (that is, to under-report the number of offline customers and pocket respective revenues) and also (ii) to shirk (that is, not to exert effort), thus leading to a novel and thus far unexplored double moral hazard problem. To address this problem, we formulate a constrained, continuous-time, stochastic optimal control problem and derive an optimal contract with a simple intuitive structure that includes a payment scheme and a potential termination time of the agent. We enrich the model to allow the principal to either (i) dynamically adjust the prices for the services in both channels or (ii) monitor the agent. Both tools help the principal to alleviate the double moral hazard problem. We derive respective optimal strategies for using those tools that guarantee the highest profits. We show that the worse the agent’s past performance is, the lower the prices should be set and the more the principal should monitor the agent.

在当前竞争激烈的商业环境中，创新合作已成为企业在竞争中取得优势的重要路径。在创新驱动的合作伙伴关系中，大型企业往往通过与小型科技公司合作，将后者的核心技术整合进自身产品，以推动产品创新、扩大市场份额。为了争取合作机会，小型企业也需要向潜在合作方展示技术整合的应用潜力和市场前景。

涵盖电子游戏、社交媒体和视频共享平台的数字媒体行业，去年收入估计打破5600亿美元。当全球多达数千万人沉迷电子游戏，多国政府和组织都积极采取措施遏制趋势。我们的研究显示，动态定价可望解决游戏成瘾的问题。

This paper studies a dynamic principal–agent setting in which the principal needs to dynamically schedule an agent to work or be suspended. When the agent is directed to work and exert effort, the arrival rate of a Poisson process is increased, which increases the principal’s payoff. Suspension, on the other hand, serves as a threat to the agent by delaying future payments. A key feature of our setting is a switching cost whenever the suspension stops and the work starts again. We formulate the problem as an optimal control model with switching and fully characterize the optimal control policies/contract structures under different parameter settings. Our analysis shows that, when the switching cost is not too high, the optimal contract demonstrates a generalized control-band structure. The length of each suspension episode, on the other hand, is fixed. Overall, the optimal contract is easy to describe, compute, and implement.