Distributional Robustness of Linear Contracts
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866911627043930112 |
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| author | Zuo, Shiliang |
| author_facet | Zuo, Shiliang |
| contents | Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the agent exerts costly effort across multiple tasks, generating a stochastic signal upon which the principal conditions payment. The principal faces distributional ambiguity: she knows the expected signal for each effort level, but not the full distribution. She seeks a contract maximizing her worst-case payoff over all distributions consistent with this partial knowledge. Our main result shows that linear contracts are optimal for such a principal. For any contract, there exists a linear contract achieving weakly higher worst-case payoff. The proof introduces the concavification approach built around the notion of self-inducing actions; these are actions where an affine contract simultaneously induces the action as optimal and supports the concave envelope of payments from above. We show that self-inducing actions always exist as maximizers of the gap between the concave envelope and agent's cost function. We extend these results to multi-party settings. In common agency with multiple principals, we show that affine contracts improve all principals' worst-case payoffs. In team production with multiple agents, we establish a complementary necessity result: if any agent's contract is non-affine, the unique ex-post robust equilibrium is zero effort. Finally, we show that homogeneous utility and cost functions yield tractable characterizations, enabling closed-form approximation ratios and a sharp boundary between computational tractability results. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_24732 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Distributional Robustness of Linear Contracts Zuo, Shiliang Computer Science and Game Theory Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the agent exerts costly effort across multiple tasks, generating a stochastic signal upon which the principal conditions payment. The principal faces distributional ambiguity: she knows the expected signal for each effort level, but not the full distribution. She seeks a contract maximizing her worst-case payoff over all distributions consistent with this partial knowledge. Our main result shows that linear contracts are optimal for such a principal. For any contract, there exists a linear contract achieving weakly higher worst-case payoff. The proof introduces the concavification approach built around the notion of self-inducing actions; these are actions where an affine contract simultaneously induces the action as optimal and supports the concave envelope of payments from above. We show that self-inducing actions always exist as maximizers of the gap between the concave envelope and agent's cost function. We extend these results to multi-party settings. In common agency with multiple principals, we show that affine contracts improve all principals' worst-case payoffs. In team production with multiple agents, we establish a complementary necessity result: if any agent's contract is non-affine, the unique ex-post robust equilibrium is zero effort. Finally, we show that homogeneous utility and cost functions yield tractable characterizations, enabling closed-form approximation ratios and a sharp boundary between computational tractability results. |
| title | Distributional Robustness of Linear Contracts |
| topic | Computer Science and Game Theory |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24732 |