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Notes -
The principal-agent problem here is that hiring manager as well as the candidate are both employees. You already have conflict of interest where hiring manager may have interest in having this new non-standard perk available for his spouse as well. Also your definition of principal as "institution" is very strange, principal should be some person be it taxpayer or donor etc. You just dodge the question - there was some other agent in HR department who created benefit of "spousal hire", so this other agent (the hiring manager) is supposedly representing the best interest of "institution" in form of official benefits policy created by this other agent (HR benefit specialist)? What is next - that department of education as another agent in chain from taxpayer agrees with this policy as well? I am sure government bureaucrats would love to have the same policy for themselves. This just obfuscates what is going on here.
Maybe the confusion lies in the naming? Because it is official benefit and not some underhanded secret thing then it stops being nepotism and becomes "spousal hiring" instead? So if a new management of some University that governs endowment of tens of billons of dollars creates a new transparent policy that select superstar researchers and top university leadership will have free and unlimited access to room full of booze and hookers on campus, then this does not mean drinking and whoring on the job, it is just "award negotiated during hiring process"? I think it is in fact much worse if you take some morally shady practice and make it legal and official, it means you are trying to remove stigma from it.
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