On the existence of optimal contract mechanisms for incomplete information principal-agent models

Abstract

Two abstract results are given for the existence of optimal contract selection mechanisms in principal-agent models; by a suitable reformulation of the (almost) incentive compatibility constraint, they deal with both single- and multi-agent models. In particular, it is shown that the existence results in a series of papers by F.H. Page [9, 10, 12, 13] follow from these two results.