Optimal Screening by Risk-Averse Principals

This paper studies the effects of principal's risk aversion on principal-agent relationship under hidden information. It finds that the agent's equilibrium effort increases and approaches the efficient level as the principal's risk aversion increases and tends to infinity. Allowing for random participation by the agent, his effort can be efficient even when the principal's risk aversion is finite. For the case of common agency with random participation, it is optimal for the principals to make the agent the residual claimant on profits and the principals' net profits monotonically decrease to zero when their risk aversion tends to infinity.