Agency Contracts with Long‐Term Customer Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In certain industries, sales agent contracts include provisions for sales commissions and clawbacks of commissions if clients are not retained. We show that contracts with these features arise in environments having up‐front selling costs recouped from ongoing sales; heterogeneous customers; limited agent access to capital markets; and imperfect commitment to long‐term contracts. We test the model using information on insurance sales agent contracts from New Zealand prior to and after bank entry into insurance sales. The evidence indicates that banks cream‐skimmed customers. We predict that this should reduce the values of sales commissions and clawbacks. The data support this prediction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".