Incorporating morale into a classical agency model: implications for incentives, effort, and organization

This paper incorporates morale into a standard principal-agent model. When morale is observable, the worker’s effort level, the optimal piece rate, and the firm’s expected profits are all generally increasing in the worker’s level of morale. Furthermore, under reasonable conditions, higher-morale individuals are more responsive to incentives. Finally, when considering morale interdependence, conditions are derived which determine optimal organization strategies in terms of pooling or separating workers, and corresponding staffing policies are discussed.      

Behavioral agency and corporate entrepreneurship: CEO equity incentives & competitive behavior

Scholars have long studied drivers of entrepreneurial behavior among established firms. Yet little is known about how individual factors shape a firm’s choice to pursue entrepreneurship. We draw on behavioral agency theory to explore the role of equity incentives in driving corporate entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest CEOs avoid corporate entrepreneurial behaviors as their option wealth increases. However industry dynamics also prove to be an important contingency when predicting the effects of both restricted stock and stock options on the likelihood that the CEO engages in corporate entrepreneurship. Our findings provide a theoretical platform for predicting dimensions of entrepreneurial behavior and highlight effects of CEO equity ownership.

     

Adverse selection,limited compensation,and the design of environmental liability insurance contract in the case of enterprise bankruptcy

In the case of incomplete environmental liability insurance, enterprises are likely to go bankrupt. Rational enterprises generally do not want to insure the environmental loss liability in case of bankruptcy even if they are compensated by insurance companies. This means that the premium calculated now is high, which may be the main reason for the current enterprises to cherish insurance. Based on this, a basic model of environmental liability insurance contract considering bankruptcy under ex ante asymmetric information is established. The model is improved by using the information screening combination tool, which further improves the efficiency of information screening.     

Knowledge as a public good: efficient sharing and incentives for development effort

We consider Research-Development joint ventures where adverse selection arises in knowledge sharing, while there is moral hazard involved in the choice of private development efforts aimed at translating privately acquired and/or shared knowledge into valuable marketable innovations. We extend earlier work by Bhattacharya et al. [Bhattacharya, S., Glazer, J., Sappington, D., 1992. Licensing and the Sharing of Knowledge in Research Joint Ventures, J. Econ. Theory, Vol. 56, pp. 43–69.] to situations where one cannot identify a ‘most knowledgeable' partner, by giving conditions under which there exist transfers implementing both efficient first best knowledge sharing and subsequent development efforts.     

Contract design in dynamic agency: An experimental analysis

This paper reports results from an experiment studying contract design in a dynamic 2‐period agency relationship with unobservable effort. A deferred compensation contract is theoretically optimal—it places all incentives on the outcomes in the second period. Observed contract choices offer a substantial part of the incentives for the high outcome in the first period suggesting a strong preference for timely rewards. Information about theoretically optimal bonuses and effort decisions shifts contract choices towards a deferred compensation contract. This contract structure is more profitable for principal participants.     

Signaling,selection and transition: empirical evidence on stepping-stones and vicious cycles in temporary agency work

Despite the growing importance of temporary work agencies, the benefits they bring to temporary agency employees (TAEs) are still disputed, and empirical findings are, by and large, mixed. Using a unique dataset comprising almost 12,000 TAEs on their first and second temporary work assignments, this work aims at disentangling the consequences of temporary agency work on the level of the individual TAE in Germany. We find that temporary agency work assignments act as learning devices for employers about the underlying ability of TAEs. High ability employees can show their qualities and fit with the organization with the time spent on temporary work assignments, albeit at decreasing rates. In addition, we find that if a TAE is assigned to a subsequent project after the first one, it is less likely that the employee transitions into permanent employment. Hence, we conclude that a division exists among TAEs: where the high ability employee may find it a stepping-stone to a desired permanent position, and others get trapped in it and have a hard time transitioning into permanent employment.     

Convex incentives in financial markets: an agent-based analysis

We investigate whether convex incentive contracts are a source of instability of financial markets as indicated by the results of a continuous double-auction asset market experiment performed by Holmen et al. (J Econ Dyn Control 40:179–194, 2014). We develop a model to replicate the setting of the experiment and perform an agent-based simulation where agents have linear or convex incentives. Extending the simulation by varying features of actual asset markets that were not studied in the experiment, our main results show that increasing the number of convex incentive contracts increases prices and volatility and decreases market liquidity, measured both as bid–ask spreads and volumes. We also observe that the influence of risk aversion on traders’ decisions decreases when there are convex contracts and that increasing the differences in initial wealth among the traders has similar effects as increasing number of convex incentive contracts.     

Supplier selection in agile supply chains: An information-processing model and an illustration

Agile supply chains need to be highly flexible in order to reconfigure quickly in response to changes in their environment. An effective supplier selection process is essential for this. This paper develops a model that helps overcome the information-processing difficulties inherent in screening a large number of potential suppliers in the early stages of the selection process. Based on radial basis function artificial neural network (RBF-ANN), the model enables potential suppliers to be assessed against multiple criteria using both quantitative and qualitative measures. Its efficacy is illustrated using empirical data from the Chinese electrical appliance and equipment manufacturing industries.     

The effect of CEO incentives on deviations from institutional norms in foreign market expansion decisions: Behavioral agency and cross-border acquisitions

CEO incentives have been the subject of great interest for human resource scholars. We explore the institutional context within which the CEO makes sense of their incentives. Our theory suggests that CEO equity incentives interact with institutional norms to influence foreign market entry choices. Specifically, we argue that CEOs will weigh the risk bearing created by equity incentives, along with the consequences of legitimacy loss, when deciding whether to deviate from institutional norms when internationalizing. In doing so, we advance human resource literature by demonstrating that CEO responses to incentives are influenced by institutional norms and that CEOs' decisions to deviate from institutional norms are shaped by their incentives. We find support for our framework in the analysis of the stake taken by acquirers in 4,184 cross-border acquisitions.     

Outlet ownership in franchising systems: an agency based approach

Building on prior agency theoretic explanations of the franchisor–franchisee relationship, this paper introduces the franchise system manager in the traditional dyadic channel. This allows us to link the franchisors internal agency problems of providing incentives to managers to their external agency problems of acquiring and extracting rents from franchisees. I find preliminary empirical support for this approach in a structural equations model estimated on a franchise system data set. I then develop and analyze an agency‐theoretic model with agency tradeoffs. An explicit rationale for mixed ownership in franchising emerges from the model, where the share of company owned outlets is endogenously determined as the tradeoff between franchisee rents and managerial compensation. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distribution,efficiency and incentives in organizations

This paper formulates incentives for individual workers in competitive firms in general equilibrium. Piece-rates and rewards for relative performance can elicit efficient effort in equilibrium, but workers benefit from collusion to reduce effort and consumption and expropriate capitalists by lowering the rental, while employers may choose equilibria with excessive ‘effort’. When there is uncertainty about true individual effort, prizes and limited penalties for best and worst performance can support efficient solutions, while income-risk declines as the size of the team grows. If penalties are prohibited, ex post inequality is multiplied and welfare declines.     

Endogenous viral mutations,evolutionary selection,and containment policy design

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - How will the novel coronavirus evolve? I study a simple epidemiological model, in which mutations may change the properties of the virus and its...     

A mechanism design approach to an optimal contract under ex ante and ex post private information

This paper applies a mechanism design approach to the problem of an optimal contract when one party has both ex ante and ex post private information. With ex ante private information added to the costly state verification environment, the timing of the contract is important in achieving the first-best investment decision. It is shown that an optimal contract involves precommitment, a feature often observed in many bank loan contracts. An optimal contract thus obtained is interpreted as t he golden parachute, a device providing incentives to managers not to distort the running of a firm to fight takeover bids. In the process of characterizing an optimal contract, the revelation principle is re-examined. Received: 12 April 1996 / Accepted: 3 December 1997     

Bayesian averaging,prediction and nonnested model selection

This paper studies the asymptotic relationship between Bayesian model averaging and post-selection frequentist predictors in both nested and nonnested models. We derive conditions under which their difference is of a smaller order of magnitude than the inverse of the square root of the sample size in large samples. This result depends crucially on the relation between posterior odds and frequentist model selection criteria. Weak conditions are given under which consistent model selection is feasible, regardless of whether models are nested or nonnested and regardless of whether models are correctly specified or not, in the sense that they select the best model with the least number of parameters with probability converging to 1. Under these conditions, Bayesian posterior odds and BICs are consistent for selecting among nested models, but are not consistent for selecting among nonnested models and possibly overlapping models. These findings have important bearing for applied researchers who are frequent users of model selection tools for empirical investigation of model predictions.     

Microelectronics,technological change and industrialised economies: an overview*

This article presents an overview of how microelectronics affects industrialised economies, and specifically the world of work. It discusses first, the effect on organisation and markets; second, its employment consequences; and third, the implications for skills and training.     

基于德尔菲调查的市级地方政府问责主体研究

根据面向全国政府绩效评估专家的德尔菲调查信息,分析了我国市级地方政府问责主体的现状和未来趋势.研究发现,德尔菲专家认为不同问责主体的地位存在差异;在未来三年内,党委及其部门的问责主体地位将得到进一步巩固,统计局、审计局等绩效信息收集专业机构的地位将有所凸显,同时学术专家和政协的问责主体地位得到了较多的重视,而对于国内一度备受瞩目的"公众问责政府"来说,机遇与挑战并存,其发展趋势并不明朗.     

郴州市石油桥桥型方案设计和比选

文章简要介绍郴州市石油桥桥型方案的比选情况,最终确定选择斜腿刚构桥方案,该桥型将桥梁结构与桥梁造型有机、巧妙地结合,与周围环境自然协调,符合现代城市桥梁景观和美学要求。     

Misperceptions,moral hazard and incentives in groups

Recent work has shown that, in the presence of moral hazard, balanced-budget Nash equilibria in groups are not Pareto-optimal. This work shows that when agents misperceive the effects of their actions on the joint outcome there exist a set of sharing rules which balance the budget and lead to a Pareto-optimal Nash equilibrium.