The incentive contract of subject librarians in university library under the non-linear task importance

Abstract

Under the information asymmetry, we consider the impact of task importance on the income of university managers, introducing the non-linear income function of university managers. Based on the principal-agent theory, we construct a non-linear incentive optimisation model for subject librarians. We discussed how university managers allocate incentive intensity and how the subject librarians allocate the effort level to achieve the best net expected income for university administrators and subject librarians while satisfying the constraints of participation and incentive compatibility. The results show that the optimal incentive contract for subject librarians is related to task importance, ability level, risk aversion characteristics and the randomness of the external environment in university libraries. The relative incentive intensity increases with the increase of task importance, risk aversion, ability level and randomness of information retrieval tasks, and decreases with the increase of randomness of subject service tasks.

Keywords

• principal-agent
• incentive contract
• subject librarian