Managerial Delegation Theory Revisited

This article challenges the results of the ‘classical’ managerial delegation literature, where it is assumed that the weight of the managerial bonus only depends on the owner's will to maximise his own profits. By considering sales (S) (resp. relative profit (RP)) contracts, the received literature has found that (S,S) (resp. (RP,RP)) is the unique pure‐strategy sub‐game perfect Nash equilibrium in a game that contrasts S (resp. RP) with pure profit maximisation (PM). This article shows that none of the previous results may hold when the owner negotiates about managerial compensation with his manager. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Patent Licensing Under Strategic Delegation

The modern corporation is characterized both by a separation of ownership from management and by managerial incentives that often include strategic elements in addition to the standard incentive elements. Despite the importance of these two features in the agency and corporate-governance literatures, they are absent in the treatment of the firm in the patent-licensing literature. The analysis in this paper shows how, by simply taking into account these two features of the modern corporation, it is possible to offer a new explanation for the use of royalties in licensing agreements.     

Divisionalization and Delegation in Oligopoly

We consider a model where oligopolistic firms create independent divisions or franchises, which subsequently delegate output decisions to managers. We show that the number of firms required to make divisionalization privately profitable is greater in our model than in previous pure divisionalization models. However, in contrast with pure delegation models, we show that the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium approaches perfect competition as divisionalization costs tends to zero, even with a small fixed number of firms.     

Strategic Delegation with Multiproduct Firms

This paper shows that a multiproduct firm may find it optimal not to delegate the sales of all products and therefore to employ different distribution channels for different products. It faces the following trade-off: There is a strategic effect associated with delegation, but if both products' sales are delegated, intrafirm competition is not internalized. By delegating the sales of just one of the products while selling the other product directly—partial delegation—the multiproduct manufacturer strikes just the right compromise: The externalities between its owns products are internalized partially while a strategic advantage is achieved against its rival single-product manufacturer. Partial delegation also holds if both products are sold by a common retailer; it dominates full delegation when both manufacturers are multiproduct firms .     

Strategic Delegation and Vertical Integration

This paper proposes a game‐theoretic model to analyze owners' vertical integration choices if they delegate pricing decisions to their managers. We find that all three vertical structures are possible Nash equilibrium outcomes. If the products are weak substitutes, then the outcome is that both owners adopt vertical integration. When the products are close substitutes, both owners adopt vertical separation in equilibrium. When substitution between the products is medium, the coexistence of vertical integration and vertical separation is the equilibrium outcome, and the owner corresponding to vertical separation offers exactly a profit‐maximization contract to his or her manager under this situation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Managerial Delegation Contracts under Centralized Unionization

This paper studies how alternative managerial delegation contracts in a duopoly product market interact with wage decisions taken by a central (industry‐wide) union in the labor market. Interestingly, results prove to be more varied with respect to findings by the managerial delegation literature with exogenous production costs. Most notably, it is pointed out that, in equilibrium, both firm profitability and welfare outcomes can be superior under both sales delegation and relative profit delegation, depending on various factors such as the degree of product differentiation and the competition regime. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An analysis of risky financial decisions

A problem of financing uncertain cost of a project is investigated. The paper analyses the allocation and the loss due to the cost uncertainty. Different formulations of the problem are suggested and compared: expected profits, chance constraint maximization and a utility approach. It is shown that even a risk-neutral manager is willing to pay a premium to reduce uncertainty. The two approaches to risk, chance constraint versus concave utility, are shown to be non-equivalent.     

Efficient Delegation by an Informed Principal

Motivated by examples from the automobile industry, insurance, retailing, and multinational strategy, we study an organizational structure we refer to as "partial delegation." In a bargaining problem between an informed party and an uninformed party, partial delegation involves the informed party delegating bargaining to an agent while retaining control of its private information. We show that partial delegation enables the informed party to earn information rents without creating quantity distortions. First‐best quantities are traded in equilibrium. We argue that partial delegation allows an informed party to implement efficient trade with outside parties by endogenously improving its bargaining power.     

Delegation, Committees, and Managers

Attempts to economize on decision-making time imply that groups of peers may delegate authority to a small committee of managers even though this means that the information and preferences of the uninvolved players are neglected. Decisions are more likely to be delegated to players with better information and more representative preferences. The possibility of ex post protests may force managers to take the preferences of others into account but may also give them incentives to ignore their private information. The argument may explain employees' willingness to let bosses decide, and thus throw some light on the theory of the firm.     

Strategic Delegation in a Multiproduct Mixed Industry

We examine strategic delegation in a multiproduct mixed duopoly with nonprofit organization (NPO) and for‐profit organization (FPO). We will demonstrate that the nonprofitable mission service can reduce both the interest conflicts between the NPO and FPO owners and those between the NPO owner and self‐benefited manager. The profit orientation in the compensation schemes will vary with different relative costs. Although the NPO owner may have a different objective from the FPO owner, they all end up having their managers raise their prices and reducing competition in the profitable market. Moreover, as the regulated price of mission service increases, both firms will charge more for their profitable services, but the owner of NPO could still overcompensate her or his manager, when the indirect impact on increasing the conflict of interest is higher than the direct impact on price. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Delegation of board work to committees in Europe

A sample of 6169 firm year observations in 14 western European countries between 2002 and 2009 is used to investigate how committee practice within boards of directors is related to company characteristics, and to the existence of alternative corporate governance instruments in place. We find that committees in Europe are prevalent in larger companies, and in companies with large and independent boards. However, we also find that leverage, director interlocking, concentrated ownership, and the presence of managers on the board mitigate the use of committees, suggesting that committee use is limited by the existence of alternative governance mechanisms. Consequently, recent regulatory changes in Europe that promote the creation of committees within boards may be unsuited for certain types of company, especially smaller companies and those with concentrated ownership.     

Delegation and Incentives under Evolutionarily Stable Conjectures

Existing results show that in a homogenous Cournot duopoly, commitment by delegation harms profit. This conclusion presupposes that market conduct is the same whether incentives are aggressive or accommodating. We study delegation and incentives under evolutionarily stable conjectures and show how performance pay co‐determines market conduct. In fact, in equilibrium with evolutionarily stable conjectures, we show that commitment through delegation leads to a profit increase. Manipulation of managerial incentives produces less competition and therefore benefits firms' owners even in symmetric homogenous oligopoly. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Naïve Responses to Kind Delegation

People do not like to delegate the distribution of favors. To explain this reluctance, we disentangle reward motives in an experiment in which an investor can directly transfer money to a trustee or delegate this decision to another investor. Varying the transfer values of the investor and delegate, we find that the trustee's rewards follow a rather simple pattern. In all situations, both investors are rewarded, but the person who ultimately decides gets a higher reward. Unlike studies on the punishment of delegated unkind decisions, our results do not reveal a more sophisticated reward behavior that takes people's responsibility into account. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bilateral Delegation in Duopoly Wage and Employment Bargaining

We study bilateral delegation in wage and employment bargaining between firms and unions in a Cournot duopoly. Incentive delegation creates frictions for each party between its objectives of within‐firm rent extraction and market/job stealing from the rival firm. The net effect is restraint in production, resulting in a larger bargaining pie. But each player's payoff will be inversely related to his bargaining power. We also show that if players are given a choice to delegate, they will not resort to delegation when their bargaining power is sufficiently high. This is in contrast to the scenarios commonly assumed in many models. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Utility indifference valuation for jump risky assets

We discuss utility maximization problems with exponential preferences in an incomplete market where the risky asset dynamics is described by a pure jump process driven by two independent Poisson processes. This includes results on portfolio optimization under an additional European claim. Value processes of the optimal investment problems, optimal hedging strategies and the indifference price are represented in terms of solutions to backward stochastic equations driven by the Poisson martingales. Via a duality result, the solution to the dual problems is derived. In particular, an explicit expression for the density of the minimal martingale measure is provided. The Markovian case is also discussed. This includes either asset dynamics dependent on a pure jump stochastic factor or claims written on a correlated non tradable asset.     

A theory of time preferences over risky outcomes

This paper provides two representation theorems for time preferences. They both cover as special cases a variety of time preference models considered in the experimental and theoretical literatures on intertemporal choice. In particular, similarity relations on time and outcomes, exponential, quasi-hyperbolic and hyperbolic discounting are special cases of the theorems. This approach identifies certain factors that are common to time preference structures which look so different.The paper builds on the recent work by Masatlioglu and Ok [Masatlioglu, Y., Ok, E., 2008. A theory of (relative) discounting. Journal of Economic Theory, in press] on Euclidean bundles and obtains similar representation theorems for the case of compact, separable and connected spaces of bundles. My work allows for the inclusion of the case in which bundles are lotteries.     

Stochastic optimal growth with risky labor supply

Production takes time, and labor supply and profit maximization decisions that relate to current production are typically made before all shocks affecting that production have been realized. In this paper we re-examine the problem of stochastic optimal growth with aggregate risk where the timing of the model conforms to this information structure. We provide a set of conditions under which the economy has a unique, nontrivial and stable stationary distribution. In addition, we verify key optimality properties in the presence of unbounded shocks and rewards, and provide the sample path laws necessary for consistent estimation and simulation.     

Inter-temporal preference for flexibility and risky choice

We derive an inter-temporal theory of choice, in the spirit of Kreps and Porteus [Kreps, D.M., Porteus, E.L., 1978. Temporal resolution of uncertainty and dynamic choice theory. Econometrica 46, 185–200], where decision makers have incomplete preferences. This can be used to model indecisiveness as well as unforeseen contingencies. The key to our approach is a time consistency condition and therefore the normative connection between ex-ante and ex-post choice. The time consistency condition enables a representation that is a straight forward extension of recursive utility with the exception that it features an inter-temporal ‘utility for flexibility’.     

On Price Competition with Market Share Delegation Contracts

We identify a mistake in the specification of the demand system used in the strategic delegation model based on market shares by Jansen, van Lier and van Witteloostuijn, whereby the price remains above marginal cost when goods are homogeneous. After amending this aspect, we perform a profit comparison with the alternative delegation scheme à la Fershtman and Judd (1987). Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.