Margaret Meyer
Official Fellow in Economics, Nuffield College
Nuffield College
+44 1865 278570
Ph.D., Stanford University (1986)
Official Fellow in Economics, Nuffield College, Oxford University.
Current Research Topics: Organizational economics; incentives and contracts; information transmission; industrial organization.
Secretary: Maxine Collett, maxine.collett@nuffield.ox.ac.uk, +44 1865 278556.
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Gaming and Strategic Opacity in Incentive Provision
November 2018|Journal article|RAND Journal of Economicsincentives, gaming, contracts, opacity -
Gaming and Strategic Opacity in Incentive Provision
July 2017|Journal article|Cowles Foundation Discussion PaperIncentives, Gaming, Contracts, Opacity -
The Supermodular Stochastic Ordering
May 2013|Journal articleConcordance, Copula, Correlation, Interdependence, Majorization, Mixture, Supermodular, Tournament -
Gaming and Strategic Opacity in Incentive Provision
January 2013|Journal article|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesAbstract It is often suggested that incentive schemes under moral hazard can be gamed by an agent with superior knowledge of the environment and that deliberate lack of transparency about the incentive scheme can reduce gaming. We formally investigate these arguments in a two-task moral hazard model in which the agent is privately informed about which task is less costly for him. We examine a simple class of incentive schemes that are "opaque" in that they make the agent uncertain ex ante about the incentive coefficients in the linear payment rule. Relative to transparent menus of linear contracts, these opaque schemes induce more balanced efforts, but they also impose more risk on the agent per unit of aggregate effort induced. We identify specific settings in which optimally designed opaque schemes not only strictly dominate the best transparent menu but also eliminate the efficiency losses from the agent's hidden information. Opaque schemes are more likely to be preferred to transparent ones when (i) the agent's privately known preference between the tasks is weak; (ii) the agent's risk aversion is significant; (iii) efforts on the tasks are highly complementary for the principal; or (iv) the errors in measuring performance have large correlation or small variance. Revised April 2018Contracts, incentives, gaming, opacity, randomization
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Theoretical Economics
Robustness of full revelation in multisender cheap talk
November 2019|Working paper|Theoretical EconomicsCopyright © 2019 The Authors. This paper studies information transmission in a two-sender, multidimensional cheap talk setting where there are exogenous constraints on the (convex) feasible set of policies for the receiver, and where the receiver is uncertain about both the directions and the magnitudes of the senders' bias vectors. With the supports of the biases represented by cones, we prove that whenever there exists an equilibrium that fully reveals the state, there exists a robust fully revealing equilibrium (FRE), i.e., one in which small deviations result in only small punishments. We provide a geometric condition—the local deterrence condition—that relates the cones of the biases to the frontier of the policy space, which is necessary and sufficient for the existence of a FRE. We also construct a specific policy rule for the receiver—the min rule—that supports a robust FRE whenever one exists. -
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
Robustness of Full Revelation in Multisender Cheap Talk
January 2019|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesThis paper studies information transmission in a two-sender, multidimensional cheap talk setting where there are exogenous constraints on the (convex) feasible set of policies for the receiver and where the receiver is uncertain about both the directions and the magnitudes of the senders’ bias vectors. With the supports of the biases represented by cones, we prove that whenever there exists an equilibrium which fully reveals the state (a FRE), there exists a robust FRE, i.e. one in which small deviations result in only small punishments. We provide a geometric condition, the Local Deterrence Condition, relating the cones of the biases to the frontier of the policy space, that is necessary and sufficient for the existence of a FRE. We also construct a specific policy rule for the receiver, the Min Rule, that supports a robust FRE whenever one exists. Revised January 2019Cheap talk, information transmission, multisender, full revelation, robustness -
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
Beyond Correlation: Measuring Interdependence Through Complementarities
May 2013|Working paper|Department of Economics Discussion Paper SeriesAbstract Given two sets of random variables, how can one determine whether the former variables are more interdependent than the latter? This question is of major importance to economists, for example, in comparing how various policies affect systemic risk or income inequality. Moreover, correlation is ill-suited to this task as it is typically not justified by any economic objective. Economists' interest in interdependence often stems from complementarities (or substitutabilities) in the environment they analyze. This paper studies interdependence using supermodular objective functions: these functions treat their variables as complements, and their expectation increases as the realizations of the variables become more aligned. The supermodular ordering has a linear structure, which we exploit to obtain tractable characterizations and methods for comparing multivariate distributions, and extend when objective functions are also monotonic or symmetric. We also provide suffcient conditions for comparing random variables generated by common and idiosyncratic shocks or by heterogeneous lotteries, and illustrate our methods with several applications. Revised August 2015Interdependence, Supermodularity, Correlation, Copula, Mixture, Majorization, Tournament -
Gaming and Strategic Opacity in Incentive Provision
January 2013|Working papercontracts, gaming, incentives, opacity, randomization