Zusammenfassung:
We study contracting when both principal and agent have to exert noncontractible effort for production to take place. An analyst is uncertain about what actions are available and evaluates a contract by the expected payoffs it guarantees to each party in spite of the surrounding uncertainty. Both parties are risk-neutral; there is no limited liability. Linear contracts, which leave the agent with a constant share of output in exchange for a fixed fee, are optimal. This result holds both in a preliminary version of the model, where the principal only chooses to supply or not supply an input, and in several variants of a more general version, where the principal may have multiple choices of input. The model thus generates nontrivial linear sharing rules without relying on either limited liability or risk aversion.