Consider an environment such as a political election where a principal requires the
completion of multiple tasks, but an agent can only be rewarded with a hire/fire decision
rather than an endogenously chosen monetary payment. When the principal hires a single
agent to perform multiple tasks, the agent allocates effort between the tasks inefficiently. I
demonstrate that, even though hiring multiple agents completely mitigates this effort
distortion problem, the principal is still better off hiring a single agent if the (exogenous) …