演講者簡介 : 許志云教授為Ph.D. in Managerial Economics and Strategy，Northwestern University (2008)。現為香港大學經濟與金融學院助理教授。其主要研究領域為應用個體與產業組織理論。
演講摘要 : When a principal hires an agent to do searching, she needs to motivate the agent to pay effort as well as to deliver a suitable result. Since different principals have different taste, there is an opportunity for the agents to cooperate among themselves and use commission sharing to better match results to the principals. This paper studies how such fee-sharing arrangement affects the agents' incentive when exerting effort and the principals' incentive when offering contracts. I show that fee-sharing arrangement introduces a public-good problem between the principals. This effect depresses the equilibrium effort level by the agents compared to the benchmark where inter-agent interaction is not possible. However, the welfare implication of this public-good effect depends on whether the effort is "targeted" or "un-targeted", that is, whether the agent's effort increases the chance of a good fit to one's own principal, or it increases the value of the result to all principals
