We provide a justification for the prevalence of linear (commission-based) contracts in practice under the Bayesian framework. We consider a hidden-action principal-agent model, in which actions require different amounts of effort, and the agent's cost per-unit-of-effort is private. We show that linear contracts are near-optimal whenever there is sufficient uncertainty in the principal-agent setting.

翻译：我们为线性（佣金基础）合同在实际中的普遍存在提供了基于贝叶斯框架的合理性论证。本研究考虑一个隐藏行动委托-代理模型，其中不同行动所需努力程度各异，且代理人单位努力成本为私有信息。我们证明，当委托-代理环境存在充分不确定性时，线性合同近似最优。