Cooperation or Collusion? Rents in Relational Contracts for Teams

Abstract

We consider relational contracts for teams in which the agents monitor each other. We demonstrate that providing rents to the agents strengthens peer sanction endowed within the agents' ongoing relationship, which may have a negative effect to induce unproductive collusion as well as a positive effect to establish a productive working practice. An optimal relational contract could establish cooperation through peer monitoring even under relative performance evaluation, which outperforms working environments operated by a multitasking single agent. Our result also suggests an implication on how privately observed individual signals should be aggregated to a commonly observed team signal.