Provision of Incentives for Information Acquisition: Forecast-Based Contracts vs. Menus of Linear Contracts

In the producer–seller relationship, the seller, besides his role of selling, is often in an ideal position to gather useful market information for the producer’s operations planning. Incentive alignment is critical to motivate both information-acquisition and sales efforts. Two popular contract forms are investigated. One is the forecast-based contract (FC) that requires the seller to submit a demand forecast: the seller obtains commissions from the realized sales but is also obliged to pay a penalty for any deviation of the sales from the forecast. The other is the classical menu of linear contracts (MLC), from which the seller can choose a contract that specifies a unique commission rate and a fixed payment. The conventional understanding suggests that the MLC is superior, but it is often assumed that information is exogenously endowed. In contrast, we find that, with an endogenous information-acquisition effort, the MLC may suffer from a conflicted moral hazard effect that creates friction between motivations for the two efforts. The FC can, however, decouple these two tasks and thus dominate the MLC. We further find that when ensuring interim participation is necessary (e.g., renegotiation cannot be prevented after information acquisition), the performance of the FC might be affected by the adverse selection effect because it is unable to effectively separate different types, at which the MLC excels. We show that when the demand and supply mismatch cost is substantial, the conflicted moral hazard effect dominates the adverse selection effect, and the FC is more efficient, and it is the converse otherwise. These findings can enrich the understanding of these two contract forms and are useful for sales and operations planning. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.