Efficiency,incentives, and individual labor supply in the labor-managed firm

Parallels are drawn between the approach to the theory of individual labor supply used by Sen (“Labor Allocation in a Co-operative Enterprise.” Rev. Econ. Stud.33: 361–371, Oct. 1966) and approaches of more recent contributions. The paper considers questions of comparative statics in a general model and attempts to distinguish between behavior in labor-managed firms and profit-maximizing firms. Diagrammatic analysis is used for a simple case where income effects are absent. Questions of efficiency and comparative statics are studied in the short run (membership fixed) and in the medium term (membership variable). Finally an incentive scheme to promote efficiency is described.     

Strategic managerial incentives in a two-period Cournot duopoly

This paper examines the nature of optimal managerial incentives in the context of a duopoly marked by competition between the firm's managers in a dynamic production environment. If the marginal cost of production falls moderately over time or remains unchanged, there exists an equilibrium where one owner requires her manager to maximize profit, whereas the rival-owner requires her manager to maximize sales revenue. The profit-maximizing manager turns his firm into a Stackelberg-leader, while the sales-revenue-maximizing manager turns his firm into a Stackelberg-follower. Further, the profit-maximizing manager may generate a larger firm profit relative to the sales-revenue-maximizing manager.     

Optimism bias and incentive contracts in portfolio delegation

This paper incorporates the well-documented managerial optimism bias into a standard portfolio delegation problem to study its impact on investment strategies and the optimal incentive contract offered by the investor to the manager. It is shown that the optimistic manager trades a larger quantity of the risky asset and thus takes more risk than the rational manager. Managerial optimism bias can offset her risk aversion and increase the investor's wealth by reducing moral hazard between the investor and the manager. Furthermore, a pronounced optimism bias reduces the incentive component of the incentive contract, suggesting that an optimistic manager requires fewer incentives to align her decisions with the interests of the investor.     

Optimal Contracts When a Worker Envies His Boss

A worker's utility may increase with his income, but envy canmake his utility decline with his employer's income. This articleuses a principal-agent model to study profit-maximizing contractswhen a worker envies his employer. Envy tightens the worker'sparticipation constraint and so calls for higher pay and/ora softer effort requirement. Moreover, a firm with an enviousworker can benefit from profit sharing, even when the worker'seffort is fully contractible. We discuss several applicationsof our theoretical work: envy can explain why a lower-levelworker is awarded stock options, why incentive pay is lowerin nonprofit organizations, and how governmental productionof a good can be cheaper than private production.     

Socially responsible firms and endogenous choice of strategic incentives

In this paper we are analyzing a mixed quantity-setting duopoly consisting of a socially concerned firm and a profit-maximizing firm. The socially concerned firm considers one group of stakeholders in its objective function and maximizes its profit plus a share of consumer surplus. Both firms have the option to hire a manager who determines the production quantity on behalf of the firm's owner. We find that in the subgame-perfect equilibrium of this game both firms hire a manager and delegate the production choice. If the unit production costs of the firms are similar, then the socially concerned firm has a higher market share and even higher profit. Interestingly, we observe that the relationship between the share of consumer surplus taken into account by the socially concerned firm and its profit is non-monotonic. As the share increases, the socially concerned firm's profit first increases and then decreases. The conclusion is that it pays off to take stakeholder interests into account, but not too much.     

Absenteeism: A comparison of incentives in alternative organizations

This paper uses a game-theoretic model to analyze the incentives workers may have to play “hookey” from work given that there is an outwardly unobservable probability of being sick and thus being unable to work. We compare incentives and equilibria in labor-managed firms (LMFs) and in profit-maximizing firms (PMFs), both in single-period and repeated games. We show, among other things, that in an egalitarian LMF there are circumstances under which members will not work when it is optimal to work, while the PMF suffers from the opposite problem; daily paid workers will work even when it would be better if they did not.     

Strategic delegation under quality competition

This paper examines strategic manipulations of incentive contracts in a model where firms compete in quality as well as in price. Compensation schemes for managers are based on a linear combination of profits and sales. For a given level of quality, a firm desires to reduce the manager's compensation when product sales increase; this serves as the firm's commitment to raise prices. Nevertheless, in general, a manager has a stronger incentive to produce goods of higher quality if he is compensated according to sales. Therefore, a compensation scheme that penalizes a manager when sales increase may result in products that are inferior to those of its rival. We show that, depending on the nature of quality, a positive weight on sales may be desirable when firms compete in quality and price. Welfare implications are also explored.     

Strategic incentive in mixed oligopoly

This paper develops a two stage game model with two competing firms in a mixed oligopolistic market, a public firm and a private firm, and only the public firm giving its manager an incentive contract. The paper presents three types of public firm owner’s objective function and each objective function corresponds to three types of delegation, either of a profit-revenue type, or of a relative performance, or, finally, of a market share one. In an equilibrium, the public firm owner has a dominant strategy to reward his manager with an incentive contract combining own profits and competitor’s profits. Different from Manasakis et al. (2007), this paper suggests that the dominant strategy of the public firm owner is to reward his manager with a profit-revenue type of contract or a market-share type of contract, that is to say profit-revenue is identical with market-share. Using relative-performance type of contract will move the manager away from the owner’s true objective function when the public firm owner only pursues maximizing the social welfare. The private firm will be crowded out and the public firm is the only producer of the market. Under profits-revenues type of contract, the owner’s objective of maximizing the summation of the profit and consumer surplus leads the manager more aggressive. Different combinations give us different results. By comparing the results, each type of incentive contract is an owner’s best response to his decision.     

创始人CFO、风险容忍度与企业创新

CFO作为长期从事资本运作与风险管理的职业经理人，其职业特征决定了高避险偏好，在为企业创新提供资本支持时更谨慎，而创始人作为一种与企业有特殊情感连接的管理者，对创新孵化通常持有更为积极的态度。然而，有关“创始人+CFO”这一在初创企业中大量存在的联合身份特征，究竟能否影响以及如何影响企业创新的文献却较为鲜见。鉴于此，通过实证分析发现：对于兼具创始人身份的CFO，尽管受到较强避险意愿的约束，但创始人身份特征带来的风险容忍度会对创新产生正向激励效应，即具有联合身份特征的CFO比普通CFO具有更高的创新激励作用；就激励路径而言，创始人CFO既会加大自身研发投入、以协同技术部门创新的方式实现创新激励，也会通过自身资本运作（参股、控股）促进外延式创新，表现为联营、合营公司的专利水平更高。相关结论在剔除“自选择和非时变不可观测异质性”等内生性后依然成立。结论拓展了创新驱动影响因素的研究维度，可为CFO作为企业战略合作伙伴激励创新提供路径支持。     

股票期权风险承担激励、管理者权力与企业研发创新

以2006-2016年公布股票期权激励方案的上市公司为样本,探讨高管期权薪酬风险承担激励和管理者权力对企业研发创新的影响。研究表明,管理者期权薪酬风险承担激励和管理者权力均对企业研发创新具有促进作用;当二者同时存在时,期权薪酬激励与管理者权力之间会产生负向协同效应,反而会阻碍企业研发创新。其原因可能在于,管理者可以利用手中的权利影响薪酬合约制定过程而轻松获取租金,从而放弃风险较高的研发创新活动。研究结论丰富了企业创新、管理者权力和高管股权激励相关研究,对于提高企业创新能力、改进公司治理具有一定借鉴意义。     

浅析企业战略性薪酬策略

薪酬作为人力资源管理中战略性激励机制的焦点之一,是员工为企业工作所追求的个人目标和工作动机产生的源泉,是决定企业战略性激励有效性的关键变量。应从设计业绩工资制度、根据战略要求选择工资政策、注重内在薪酬的激励作用、关注薪酬设计的沟通交流及让员工参与薪酬制度的设计与管理等方面着手制定薪酬策略,提高企业人力资源激励效率。     

Strategic commitment and Cournot competition with labor-managed and profit-maximizing firms

This paper examines the behavior of a labor-managed income-per-member-maximizing firm and a profit-maximizing firm in a quantity-setting model with a strategic commitment. First, each firm independently decides whether or not to make a commitment to capacity. This capacity may subsequently be increased, but cannot be decreased. Hence, each firm’s investment choice changes its capital cost from a variable one into a fixed one. Second, each firm independently chooses its actual output. The paper examines the equilibrium of the quantity-setting mixed model and shows whether or not capacity investment is effective for the labor-managed firm and the profit-maximizing firm.     

Managerial compensation and the underinvestment problem

This paper studies the effect of managerial compensation terms on the well-known “underinvestment” incentive. We extend the Mauer and Ott (2000) real-option model of corporate expansion, and show that, when the manager maximizes the value of his compensation package (rather than equity value), the underinvestment problem can be substantially mitigated. Further, by designing an appropriate compensation contract, it is possible to eliminate the underinvestment incentive altogether. This managerial contract, consisting of fixed salary and equity ownership, is explicitly derived in the model. The equity ownership level is found to be an increasing function of the manager's fixed salary and the company's earnings growth rate, and a decreasing function of leverage ratio, earnings volatility, tax rate, bankruptcy costs, and the manager's severance pay at bankruptcy.     

Incentives and managerial effort under competitive pressure: An experiment

We investigate how increased competition affects firm owners׳ incentives and managers׳ efforts in a laboratory experiment. Each owner offers a compensation scheme to his manager in two different conditions: under monopoly and under Cournot duopoly. Following acceptance of the compensation, the manager chooses an effort level to increase the probability of a cost-reduction which affects the firm׳s profit. According to standard theoretical predictions the entry of a rival firm in a monopolistic industry affects negatively both the incentive compensation and the effort level. Our experimental findings show that the entry of a rival firm has two effects on managerial effort: an internalization effect which affects positively the level of effort and an income effect which has a negative impact on effort. The combined outcome of these two effects is neutral with respect to managerial effort: we observe that when competition reduces the firm׳s profit, the owner reacts by offering lower incentives but despite the lower incentives the manager still accepts the contract offer and exerts the same level of effort than under the monopoly condition.     

市场竞争、经理人激励与上市公司舞弊行为——来自中国证监会处罚公告的经验证据

中国上市公司控制权市场、经理人市场和经理人激励对舞弊行为影响的检验结果表明,在控制权市场竞争中只有第二大股东的制衡力量对舞弊行为起到显著的抑制作用,经理人市场的竞争程度与公司舞弊行为显著负相关,不成熟的经理人市场使得经理人的声誉机制和报酬激励机制都难以发挥抑制舞弊行为的作用。治理上市公司舞弊行为的更好路径是优化经理人的选任机制和竞争机制,而不是仅仅强化其激励。     

Information,motivation, and control in decentralized planning: the case of discretionary managerial behavior

A simple piecewise-linear managerial incentive scheme is analyzed in a decision-making environment in which a manager is allowed some discretionary activity (effort). Initially, he must report to the planner a target that will be used subsequently to evaluate his performance. If managerial effort is chosen after the random production components are realized, this predicted target will be more realizable than one reported in the absence of such discretionary adjustment. The sensitivity of target and performance to the parameters of the incentive scheme and the manager's utility function is examined to study the planner's ability to both acquire information and motivate performance. J. Comp. Econ., Sept. 1979, 3(3), pp. 235–253. Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.     

Matching through position auctions

Using a mechanism design framework, we characterize how a profit-maximizing intermediary can design matching markets when each agent is privately informed about his quality as a partner. Sufficient conditions are provided that ensure a version of positive assortative matching (what we call truncated positive assortative matching) maximizes profits. Under these conditions, all-pay position auctions always implement the profit-maximizing allocation. Winners-pay position auctions, however, only do so in sufficiently large markets.     

高管团队内薪酬差距、公司绩效和治理结构

公司高管团队内薪酬差距主要指CEO薪酬水平同其他高层管理人员之间的薪酬数额的差别。本文对我国上市公司内高层管理人员薪酬差距和公司未来绩效之间关系进行了检验 ,发现二者之间具有显著的正向关系 ,大薪酬差距可以提升公司绩效。该结果支持薪酬激励的锦标赛理论而不是行为理论。本文还发现 ,影响我国公司薪酬差距的主要因素不是公司外部市场环境因素和企业自身经营运作上的特点 ,而是公司治理结构。本文认为 ,我国上市公司应适当提高薪酬差距以维持足够的锦标赛激励能量 ,而提高薪酬差距的主要出路在于进行治理结构改革。     

Operating efficiency and output insensitive employment contracts for capital management

Summary This paper considers a problem in which an agent is hired to manage a capital investment and subsequently receives private information regarding the productivity of the capital investment. The capital manager must decide whether to invest capital supplied by the firm (the principal), or to divert these investment funds to perquisite consumption. If the manager decides to invest, the manager must then select the level of operating efficiency (productivity) of the capital investment, this latter choice being unobservable and constrained by the (maximal) productivity of the investment. In this setting we demonstrate that the optimal employment contract, from the perspective of the firm hiring the manager, is the contract whichminimizes the dependence of the manager's compensation on firm output. This contract pays the manager a fixed wage whenever output from the investment exceeds the wage and provides the manager with all of the projects rents whenever output falls below this level. Thus, we provide a setting in which fixed wage contracts are the optimal incentive contract even when agents are risk neutral and contracts can be costlessly written on future output.We would like to thank the participants in the Princeton Economics and Finance Workshop and the Ohio State University Finance Workshop for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The second author gratefully acknowledges the research support of the Georgia State College of Business Administration Research Council.     

义务教育学校绩效工资改革的经济学分析——基于委托—代理理论的分析框架

本文利用委托—代理理论,对义务教育学校绩效工资改革中教师行为和地方政府行为分别进行了分析。研究发现,绩效工资的最优设计是,工资函数中包含一个固定支付和一个可变支付,这样可以有效减少教师的道德风险行为;如果地方政府掌握了关于教师绩效方面较多的信息,并且改革的政治成本和管理成本较小时,将有利于绩效工资改革的推行。