Incentive Scheme Designer

Design and diagnose incentive contracts for situations where effort is unobservable (moral hazard). Use this skill when a user needs to motivate a contractor, employee, co-founder, or agent whose actions cannot be directly monitored; when a user is deciding between a fixed salary, piece-rate, equity share, bonus, or fine structure; when a user needs to set the bonus level so that high-quality effort is in the agent's self-interest; when a user must satisfy both the participation constraint (agent accepts the deal) and the incentive compatibility constraint (agent exerts the desired effort); when a user wants to diagnose why an existing incentive scheme is failing — through sandbagging, gaming, effort diversion, or lack of effort; when a user is deciding between carrots and sticks and needs to understand when each is preferred; when a user suspects financial incentives are crowding out intrinsic motivation (Gneezy/Rustichini effect); when a user manages people performing multiple tasks and needs to know whether to bundle or separate them based on complementarity vs. substitutability; when a user needs to understand efficiency wages and when above-market pay is the cheapest way to deter shirking. This skill covers the full principal-agent problem after a contract is signed. It does NOT cover pre-contract adverse selection (who to hire) — use the information-asymmetry-strategist skill for that.

Install

Claude CodeClawhHubnpxCursorCodexGemini CLI

1. Add marketplace

› /plugin marketplace add bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills

2. Install plugin

› /plugin install the-art-of-strategy@bookforge-skills

3. Use the skill

› /incentive-scheme-designer

CC-BY-SA · Open sourceGitHub

Source Book

The Art of Strategy

Avinash K. Dixit & Barry J. Nalebuff

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Information Asymmetry Strategist

Diagnose and resolve information asymmetry in strategic interactions using four mechanisms: signaling, screening, signal jamming, and countersignaling. Use this skill when a user needs to credibly communicate private information to an uninformed counterpart; when a user needs to elicit honest information from a better-informed counterpart without being able to verify their claims; when a user suspects they are on the receiving end of signal jamming or adverse selection and wants to see through it; when a user is designing a pricing scheme, contract structure, hiring process, or product menu and needs to induce self-selection among different customer or candidate types; when a user wants to know whether to signal their quality, countersignal by staying silent, or jam an opponent's signals; when a user needs to apply Bayes' rule to update beliefs after observing an opponent's action in a mixed-strategy game; when a user faces Akerlof-style market collapse risk and wants to identify signaling or screening remedies; when a user is designing a menu of options (e.g., airline fare classes, insurance deductibles, product tiers) and needs to check participation constraints and incentive compatibility constraints. This skill handles both directions of information asymmetry: the informed party communicating outward (signaling, countersignaling, jamming) and the uninformed party extracting information inward (screening, adverse selection management). It does NOT cover moral hazard or principal-agent problems after a contract is signed, nor does it handle simultaneous-move games without information asymmetry (use the Nash equilibrium skill for those).

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