Relational Contracting in Partnerships

When performance is not verifiable, firms in a long-term relationship may rely on incentive contracts that are self-enforced or "relational." This paper studies the optimal design and performance of relational contracts in partnerships such as joint ventures or buyer-seller alliances. Optimal contracts look the same in each period as long as the relationship continues, but may require termination of the relationship after bad outcomes. Payments between the partners depend on their relative performance. In the special case of bilateral trade with specific investments, optimal relational contracting results in a price that varies with cost and demand conditions but is more stable than under spot market bargaining. Parallels are drawn with "Japanese style" subcontracting.     

Equilibrium Principal‐Agent Contracts: Competition and R&D Incentives

We analyze competition between firms engaged in R&D activities and market competition to study the choice of the incentive contracts for managers with hidden productivity. Oligopolistic screening requires extra effort/investment from the most productive managers: under additional assumptions on the hazard rate of the distribution of types we obtain no distortion in the middle rather than at the top. The equilibrium contracts are characterized by effort differentials between (any) two types always increasing with the number of firms, suggesting a positive relation between competition and high‐powered incentives. An inverted U curve between competition and absolute investments can emerge for the most productive managers.     

Cross-ownership as a hostage exchange to support collaboration

The impossibility of writing complete contracts causes loss of profitable transactions among firms, since their managers cannot ex ante bind themselves to future actions. We show how a reallocation of ownership rights into a network of mutual shareholdings among a coalition of firms produces an efficient enforcement mechanism. Co-operation is achieved by exchanging control rights until a mutual threat of capture of control is established. By making control over their firms vulnerable to a takeover by the other members of the coalition, each firm is able to make a credible commitment to future efficient actions. In equilibrium no punishment is administered, so that the arrangement achieves the outcome under complete contracts. More generally, it is proved that a mutual hostage exchange may dominate the threat of loss of reputation as an enforcement mechanism.     

Contract ineffectiveness in emerging markets: An institutional theory perspective

The effectiveness of contracts is bounded by the institutional environment in which they are designed and enforced. When firms form supply chain partnerships in emerging markets, they may experience contract ineffectiveness, which is defined as a firm's perceived limits of contracts with respect to safeguarding interests and coordinating activities. Specifically, we identify two institutional factors that may give rise to contract ineffectiveness, information transparency and legal enforceability, as they determine how effectively a firm designs and enforces a contract. In addition, we reveal that contract ineffectiveness prompts a firm to seek social ties, including business ties and political ties, to overcome the institutionally induced limits of contracts. These efforts, however, are moderated by the type of predominant pressure a firm bears. While equity pressure strengthens the relationship between contract ineffectiveness and a firm's pursuit of social ties, efficiency pressure weakens this relationship, because seeking social ties imposes an extra burden of efficiency. Tested by data collected from 187 distributors in China, our study reveals the institutional causes and the consequences of contract ineffectiveness, which is a common problem encountered by firms when forming supply chain partnerships in emerging markets.     

Who bribes in public contracting and why: worldwide evidence from firms

We study procurement bribery utilizing survey data from 11,000 enterprises in 125 countries. About one-third of managers report that firms like theirs bribe to secure a public contract, paying about 8 % of the contract value. Econometric estimations suggest that national governance factors, such as democratic accountability, press freedom, and rule of law, are associated with lower bribery. Larger and foreign-owned firms are less likely to bribe than smaller domestic ones. But among bribers, foreign and domestic firms pay similar amounts. Multinational firms appear sensitive to reputational risks in their home countries, but partially adapt to their host country environments.     

Efficiency in complementary partnerships with competition

The objective of this paper is to show how efficiency can be implemented in a market with strictly complementary inputs when the productive firms undertake unobservable effort. The observable output is a joint undertaking by a partnership consisting of two types of firms. It is shown that simple linear sharing rules cannot implement socially optimal effort, but a modified linear sharing rule can implement the first‐best outcome provided that commitment to the proposed sharing rule is possible. This is so even when the sharing rule is proposed by one of the active partners. When opening up for the possibility of renegotiating sharing contracts that have undesirable properties for one or more of the firms, it becomes more difficult to implement socially efficient solutions. Implementation of the socially efficient outcome requires that the sharing rule is proposed by an outsider to the partnership. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The equivalence of supporting software delegation and sales delegation

This paper considers a duopoly market with horizontally differentiated system goods to examine system owners' behaviors under supporting software delegation, in which owners of system firms use varieties of supporting software, coupled with profit, to evaluate their managers' performance. Supporting software delegation seems to induce managers to act more aggressively in price competition than sales delegation does; however, we prove that if two systems are compatible and the varieties of supporting software are determined by hardware owners' overall expenditure amount on software, then supporting software delegation is equivalent to sales delegation. Owners of system firms induce their managers to act less aggressively in hardware price competition by offering contracts with a negative weight on varieties of supporting software under supporting software delegation. We find that stronger network externalities do not reverse system owners' contracting behaviors under supporting software delegation. Finally, it is worth mentioning that hardware technologies are static in this paper. In other words, dynamic changes such as hardware evolution are not considered in our analysis.     

Overcoming the liability of smallness by recruiting through networks in China: a guanxi-based social capital perspective

We investigate the role of guanxi in Chinese entrepreneurial firms’ recruitment practices in attempting to overcome the liability of smallness. Combining insights from the social capital and guanxi literature, we theorize the guanxi-based social capital perspective and use it to analysis 96 in-depth interviews with multiple members (entrepreneurs, senior managers and factory workers) from 15 die-casting entrepreneurial firms in Guangdong province, China. We find that the use of guanxi in recruitment practice can overcome the liability of smallness because it makes the hiring process more convenient, improves firms’ attractiveness to jobseekers and enhances the person-organizational fit between new hires and firms. We discuss how Chinese entrepreneurs and their senior managers use guanxi strategically to achieve these advantages. On the other hand, our findings suggest that jobseekers can also use guanxi to increase their options, improve their bargaining power and distract firms’ attention away from hiring the most appropriate candidate for the job in order to undermine the effectiveness of Chinese entrepreneurial firms’ recruitment procedures. We explore the implications of these findings for academic research and managerial practice.     

Competition for Managers and Product Market Efficiency

We investigate whether competition between two firms to hire managers with different abilities might affect efficiency in the product market, when a manager's effort is his/her private information. We conclude that competition for managers might lead to an improvement in efficiency in the market of the firm that attracts the most efficient manager. Competition for managers might even eliminate the productive efficiency loss due to the asymmetry of information in the firm-manager relationship.     

The challenge of using standard contracts in public–private partnerships

A call for an increased use of standard contracts in public–private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure development is noticeable in practice. These contracts are expected to simplify and improve procurement by creating opportunities for learning, lower transaction costs, and better competition. This paper delineates standard contracts in PPP as a new venue for research and unfolds their potential impact. Here lies an important challenge since the benefits of standardization are not as straightforward as they look at first sight, particularly when taking into account the tension between the powerful, control-oriented role of contracting authorities and the need for contingent, informal contracting.     

Commitment in R&D tournaments via strategic delegation to overoptimistic managers

This paper shows that it is profitable for a firm to hire an overoptimistic manager to commit to a certain investment strategy in an R&D tournament situation. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, all firms delegate to overoptimistic managers, where the optimal degree of overoptimism depends on the riskiness of the tournament. In these situations a manager's type may serve as a substitute for delegation via contracts. By delegating to overoptimistic managers, firms can escape the rat race nature of R&D tournaments. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attitudes towards different sources of executive appraisal: a comparison of Hong Kong Chinese and American managers in Hong Kong

This study examines the attitudes of three groups of managers in Hong Kong, namely, Hong Kong Chinese managers in local Chinese firms (HK/HK), Hong Kong Chinese managers in US firms (HK/US) and American managers in US firms (US/US), towards supervisory, peer, subordinate and multi-source appraisal of executive performance. The more recent perspective of crossvergence, within the convergence-divergence debate, provides the theoretical foundation for formulating the hypotheses. The findings indicate support for this new perspective of crossvergence. There is also evidence of the coexistence of all the three perspectives of convergence, divergence and crossvergence. The study found that the practice of supervisory appraisal is supported more by HK/US and US/US managers than by HK/HK managers. Furthermore, both HK/US and US/US managers are more supportive of subordinate evaluation than peer evaluation. Overall, the findings indicate that the traditional Chinese values may be more congruent with the notion of supervisory appraisal than with peer and subordinate evaluation. The study thus points out the importance of the compatibility of norms and beliefs regarding a management practice such as performance appraisal with the local national cultures in determining the acceptance and hence the transferability of that practice across countries.     

PRIVATIZATION AND EFFICIENCY: FROM PRINCIPALS AND AGENTS TO POLITICAL ECONOMY

Abstract.  We survey the theoretical literature on privatization and efficiency by tracing its evolution from the applications of agency theory to recent contributions in the field of political economy. The former extend the theory of regulation with incomplete information to address privatization issues, comparing state-owned enterprises with private regulated firms. The benefits of privatization may derive either from the constraints it places on malevolent agents or from the impossibility of commitment by a benevolent government because of incomplete contracts. Contributions dealing with political economy issues separate privatization from restructuring decisions. They either explore bargaining between managers and politicians or analyse the impact of privatization shaped by political preferences on efficiency. The theoretical results regarding the relation between privatization and efficiency do not lead to any definitive conclusion. Privatization may increase productive efficiency when restructuring takes place whereas its effects on allocative efficiency still remain uncertain.     

Performance compensation contracts and CEOs’ incentive to shift risk to debtholders: An empirical analysis

The paper investigates the relationships among CEO incentive contracts, manager ownership, charter value, and bank risk taking. We analyze whether the presence and magnitude of incentive contracts induce CEOs of financially distressed firms and firms with high manager ownership to take unprofitable risks that shift wealth from debtholders to equity holders. Our sample focuses on banks that had both the incentive and opportunity to shift risks, and compares them with those that did not. We compare weak and strong banks in periods when the banks’ principal creditor, the FDIC, was a lenient and then a stringent monitor. The evidence is consistent with bonus compensation inducing CEOs of financially weak firms to shift risk to debtholders only if they do not have large insider ownership. The evidence is also consistent with these contracts rewarding CEOs for their effort to manage unforeseeable risk albeit not their ability. Low charter value banks with high managerial ownership took profitable risk during the lenient regulatory period.     

Relational retention

This paper uses a repeated-game model to study the retention of talented workers in the face of competition for talent. When the job benefits that workers value are non-contractible, retention cannot be achieved by a sequence of spot contracts, but must be based on self-enforcing long-term agreements, which we call relational retention contracts. Retention then is successful only if workers trust their employers' promises. We demonstrate that relational contracts are valuable even if there are no incentive problems inside firms and that firms with a relatively low valuation for talent may be able to retain talented workers.     

A Comparison of Reporting Lags of Multinational and Domestic Firms

This study examines whether multinational firms report earnings sooner than domestic firms. When compared with domestic firms, the reporting environment and business operations of multinational firms are significantly more complex. There is a greater amount of information asymmetry between managers and shareholders of multinational firms. Therefore, multinational firms potentially face higher monitoring and external financing costs. To reduce these costs, we conjecture that managers of multinational firms take steps to reduce the information asymmetry between shareholders and management by increasing the timeliness (a proxy for relevance) of their earnings reports. Specifically, we expect multinational firms to announce earnings earlier than domestic firms. We separate earnings reporting delay into auditor‐related delay and management's discretionary delay. While test results weakly support the hypothesis that auditors take longer to audit multinational firms, there is strong evidence that managers of multinational firms release their earnings reports sooner than domestic firms.     

The setting of voluntary agreements between industry and government: Bargaining and efficiency

This paper aims at providing a preliminary economic analysis of the efficiency of an emerging environmental policy instrument: the so-called voluntary agreement. The use of a data base we have built containing 75 existing agreements in 12 OECD countries allows us to stylise these empirical objects. They are mutually agreed contracts signed between a national administration and a coalition of firms. They include a set of physical pollution reduction objectives to be reached by the firms. According to classical economic categories, they are similar to a traditional policy instrument, i.e. direct regulation, but one which has been devised after an intense negotiation process. As regards efficiency, the key question lies in the impact of such negotiations. In our analytical framework, we distinguish two subjects of negotiation: the collective environmental objective, i.e. the physical amount of pollution to be globally suppressed via the completion of the contract, and the means required to reach the collective objective, i.e. the allocation rule of private pollution reduction objectives. According to these categories a major asymmetry arises in the negotiation structure. When the dominant dimension of the negotiations concerns the environmental objective, firms are clearly opposed to the administration because of their eagerness to obtain as low an objective as possible. In that case, voluntary agreements do not seem to be an original policy approach. They can be compared with classical consultation processes of interested parties when designing new regulations and raise similar questions: the efficiency of information collection and the dangers of regulatory capture. But when the subject being bargained concerns the means to reach environmental objectives which have already been fixed, individual firms become rivals. The logic of such negotiations lies in inter-firm bargaining arbitrated by the administration. Voluntary agreements tend to be an original negotiation-based policy instrument. Decentralised bargaining improves the allocative efficiency.     

公司风险视角下上市国企管理层股权激励研究

在允许国有控股上市公司实施股权激励的背景下,考察了其不同种类风险与经营者股权激励强度的关系。先界定了风险的类型,再通过构建基于风险的两种股权激励模型,并进一步推导得出：若国有上市企业的管理层不能（可以）买卖公司以外的市场证券组合时,其最优股权激励强度与公司特别性风险成反向变化关系,而与公司整体性风险的相关关系不确定（无关）,这为正在实践中摸索的国有上市企业管理层股权激励合同的设计提供了进一步的理论建议。     

Asymmetric information and inside management trading in the Chinese market

Insider trading incentives have been widely examined in stock markets, but mainly in developed countries. Given the fact that the volatility of stock exchange markets in emerging economies is typically even higher, there is a need for research to explore the extent to which information asymmetry plays a role in management trading incentives in emerging economies. To address this research need, this study examines management trading incentives in relation to investment efficiency in Chinese listed firms on the main board and on the small- to medium-enterprises (SME) board in the period 2006 to 2017. We find that executives buy shares when firms’ investments are more efficient. The frequency of management buying also increases with investment efficiency. However, managers do not sell their shares according to firms’ investment efficiency. Moreover, executives of firms listed on the main board trade more on the asymmetric information of investment efficiency than those on the SME board.     

New career models in UK professional service firms: from up-or-out to up-and-going-nowhere?

In this paper, we empirically examine how professional service firms are adapting their promotion and career models to new market and institutional pressures, without losing the benefits of the traditional up-or-out tournament. Based on an in-depth qualitative study of 10 large UK based law firms we find that most of these firms do not have a formal up-or-out policy but that the up-or-out rule operates in practice. We also find that most firms have introduced alternative roles and a novel career policy that offers a holistic learning and development deal to associates without any expectation that unsuccessful candidates for promotion to partner should quit the firm. While this policy and the new roles formally contradict the principle of up-or-out by creating permanent non-partner positions, in practice they coexist. We conclude that the motivational power of the up-or-out tournament remains intact, notwithstanding the changes to the internal labour market structure of these professional service firms.