Optimal contract for machine repair and maintenance
A principal hires an agent to repair a machine when it is down and maintain it when it is up and earns a revenue flowwhen the machine is up. Both the up- and downtimes follow exponential distributions. If the agent exerts effort, the downtime is shortened, and uptime is prolonged. Effort, however, is costly to the agent and unobservable to the principal. We study optimal dynamic contracts that always induce the agent to exert effort while maximizing the principal's profits.We formulate the contract design problem as a stochastic optimal controlmodel with incentive constraints in continuous time over an infinite horizon. Although we consider the contract space that allows payments and potential contract termination time to take general forms, the optimal contracts demonstrate simple and intuitive structures, making them easy to describe and implement in practice.
Duke Scholars
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Related Subject Headings
- Operations Research
- 3507 Strategy, management and organisational behaviour
- 1503 Business and Management
- 0802 Computation Theory and Mathematics
- 0102 Applied Mathematics
Citation
Published In
DOI
EISSN
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Operations Research
- 3507 Strategy, management and organisational behaviour
- 1503 Business and Management
- 0802 Computation Theory and Mathematics
- 0102 Applied Mathematics