We consider a contracting relationship where the agent's effort induces monetary costs, and limits on the agent's resource restrict his capability to exert effort. We show that the principal finds it best to offer a sharing contract while providing the agent with an up-front financial transfer only when the monetary cost is neither too low nor too high. Thus, unlike in the limited liability literature, the principal might find it optimal to fund the agent. Moreover, both incentives and the amount of funding are nonmonotonic functions of the monetary cost. These results suggest that an increase in the interest rate may affect the form of contracts differently, depending on the initial level of the former. Using the analysis, we provide and discuss several predictions and policy implications.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we examine convergence properties of an inexact proximal point method with a quasi distance as a regularization term in order to find a critical point (in the sense of Toland) of a DC function (difference of two convex functions). Global convergence of the sequence and some convergence rates are obtained with additional assumptions. Second, as an application and its inspiration, we study in a dynamic setting, the very important and difficult problem of the limit of the firm and the time it takes to reach it (maturation time), when increasing returns matter in the short run. Both the formalization of the critical size of the firm in term of a recent variational rationality approach of human dynamics and the speed of convergence results are new in Behavioral Sciences.

This paper is devoted to new versions of Ekeland’s variational principle in set optimization with domination structure, where set optimization is an extension of vector optimization from vector-valued functions to set-valued maps using Kuroiwa’s set-less relations to compare one entire image set with another whole image set, and where domination structure is an extension of ordering cone in vector optimization; it assigns each element of the image space to its own domination set. We use Gerstewitz’s nonlinear scalarization function to convert a set-valued map into an extended real-valued function and the idea of the proof of Dancs-Hegedüs-Medvegyev’s fixed-point theorem. Our setting is applicable to dynamic processes of changing jobs in which the cost function does not satisfy the symmetry axiom of metrics and the class of set-valued maps acting from a quasimetric space into a real linear space. The obtained result is new even in simpler settings.

This chapter considers potential games, where agents play, each period, Nash worthwhile moves in alternation, such that their unilateral motivation to change rather than to stay, other players being supposed to stay, are high enough with respect to their resistance to change rather than to stay. This defines a generalized proximal alternating linearized algorithm, where resistance to change plays a major role, perturbation terms of alternating proximal algorithms being seen as the disutilities of net costs of moving.