Information systems, incentives and the timing of investments

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of introducing information systems into a model featuring managerial incentive problems and investment opportunities that are mutually exclusive over time. In a principal-agent model in which a manager (agent) has superior information about investment costs, we introduce information systems, the signals from which are available to both the manager and the owner of the investment opportunity, which allow the owner to decrease the manager's informational advantage.We examine (i) the characteristics of the optimal information systems; (ii) the effects of such information systems on the owner's investment and compensation choices and on the value of the investment opportunity to the owner; (iii) the effects of such information systems on the timing of investment; (iv) the effects of such information systems on the overall probability of investment; and (v) when the owner might want to improve the information system at a particular point in time.     

Allocation of Decision-making Authority

This paper addresses the question of what determines where in a firm’s hierarchy investment decisions are made. We present a simple model of a CEO and a division manager to analyze when the CEO will choose to allocate decision-making authority over an investment decision to a division manager. Both the CEO and the division manager have private information regarding the profit maximizing investment level. Because the division manager is assumed to have a preference for “empire”, neither manager will communicate her information fully to the other. We show that the probability of delegation increases with the importance of the division manager’s information and decreases with the importance of the CEO’s information. A somewhat counterintuitive result is that, in some circumstances, increases in agency problems result in increased willingness of the CEO to delegate the decision. We also characterize situations in which the CEO prefers to commit to an allocation of authority ex ante, instead of deciding based on her private information. Finally, even though the division manager is biased toward larger investments, we show that under certain conditions, the average investment will be smaller when the decision is delegated. These results help explain some findings in the empirical literature. A number of other empirical implications are developed.We thank Sudipto Dasgupta, Wouter Dessein, Jeff Ely, Mike Fishman, Ehud Kalai, John Matsusaka, Canice Prendergast, Chester Spatt, Lars Stole, Jan Zabojnik, two anonymous referees, participants at the 2002 Utah Winter Finance Conference, the 2002 European Finance Association Annual Meetings, the Harvard/MIT Organizational Economics Workshop, the 2002 University of Illinois Bear Markets Conference, and workshops at the University of Chicago and USC for helpful comments. Financial support from the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business is gratefully acknowledged.     

Search for information and portfolio selection

The paper examines the problem of how to allocate scarce resources between increasing the investor's knowledge, that is reducing his uncertainty, and the actual investment—that is a kind of an ex ante decision before the final parameters of the securities are known. Our model provides answers to questions of how the search for knowledge affects portfolio selection, to what extent additional information can improve estimates of securities' statistical parameters and how the benefits and costs of additional search alter the investor's efficient mean-variance portfolio set.     

Investment timing,agency, and information

This paper provides a model of investment timing by managers in a decentralized firm in the presence of agency conflicts and information asymmetries. When investment decisions are delegated to managers, contracts must be designed to provide incentives for managers to both extend effort and truthfully reveal private information. Using a real options approach, we show that an underlying option to invest can be decomposed into two components: a manager's option and an owner's option. The implied investment behavior differs significantly from that of the first-best no-agency solution. In particular, greater inertia occurs in investment, as the model predicts that the manager will have a more valuable option to wait than the owner.     

The Importance of Mutual Understanding Between External Accountants and Owner–Managers of SMEs

This study investigates the perspective of the owner–manager of a small or medium‐sized enterprise (SME) on the importance of mutual understanding with an external accountant. Mutual understanding means that the owner–manager understands what the accountant is saying and feels understood by the accountant. The results, based on 310 completed surveys of Belgian owner–managers, show that owner–managers who have a high level of mutual understanding use the advice of their external accountant more extensively. This is in turn positively linked to the financial health of an SME. Furthermore, several drivers that enable the establishment of a high level of mutual understanding are explored. Owner–managers with a high level of mutual understanding consider their accountant as a strategic partner, experience a high level of proactive behaviour with them, have a higher frequency of formal contact, and perceive informal contact as important. External accountants should consider these opportunities in their client management and training of internal staff. Education of clients and openness also seem very important, as the level of a client's accounting knowledge, the number of accounting topics owner–managers deal with, and transparency towards the accountant are significantly positively related to mutual understanding.     

Private versus Public Ownership: Investment,Ownership Distribution,and Optimality

Examined in this paper is the choice between private and public incorporation of an asset for an entrepreneur (asset owner) who hires a manager with superior information about the asset's return distribution. Public sale of equity is shown to be the preferred alternative when (a) capital market issue costs are low or (b) the assest's idiosyncratic risk is high and the owner is either sufficiently risk averse or sufficiently “optimistic” about the asset's expected return. Thus, those assets deemed most valuable by their owners will tend to be publicly incorporated. The paper also explores the impact of incorporation mode—private versus public—and information structure on the firm's investment policy and ownership distribution.     

Discretionary Accounting Choices: A Debt covenants Based Signalling Approach

This paper seeks to explain the discretionary accounting choices made by managers in a world characterised by asymmetric information between managers and investors. It considers a firm whose capital structure consists of both debt and equity, a manager who protects the interests of the firm's existing shareholders, and a financial market. The manager is committed to engage in an investment opportunity and needs to raise some equity to finance it. He is furthermore endowed with some private information about his firm's future earnings. The paper shows how, under certain conditions, the manager may credibly communicate his private information to investors through his accounting choices. In this equilibrium, the selection of balance sheet strengthening and income increasing accounting choices signals unfavourable information while the use of balance-sheet weakening and income- decreasing accounting choices signals favourable private information. The latter firms should thus experience positive abnormal returns around the announcement dates of their accounting choices.     

Jinan Qingqi Motorcycle Co., Ltd

The case deals with the decision in mid-1997 of StarInvest, an American investment company, on whether to subscribe to a new issue of 230 million B shares by Jinan Qingqi Motorcycle Co., Ltd. Qingqi Motorcycle is incorporated in the People’s Republic of China, and B shares were tradable only among foreign investors. The case solution is in the form of policy report from Daniel Campbell, asset manager at StarInvest, to his Investment Committee. The report contains his assessment of the opportunities and risks from China investment in general, and his recommendations on the Qingqi Motorcycle stock issue in particular. The objective of this case is to introduce students to the unique accounting issues and investment environment in China. From working on this case, the students should become familiar with the developmental steps and basic features of China’s accounting standards and capital markets. An important theme that should be emphasized by the instructor is that institutional environments are more important at influencing the accounting information in a country than the accounting standards as written on paper. The case has been used in an international accounting course offered to the MBA students. It could also be used in a similar course offered at the undergraduate level. Students having completed an introductory financial accounting course should have the required knowledge and skills to work on this case. The case can be used either as an individual assignment or as a group assignment.     

Earnings vs. stock-price based incentives in managerial compensation contracts

We develop a theory of stock-price-based incentives even when the stock price does not contain information unknown to the firm. In our model, a manager must search for and decide on new investment projects when the market may have a difference of opinion about the quality of the firm’s investment opportunities. The firm optimally provides incentives based solely on realized earnings, leading to an efficient investment policy, when the market has congruent or pessimistic beliefs; however, the firm optimally introduces stock-price-based incentives, leading to an inefficient investment policy, when the market has optimistic beliefs. If the firm can raise equity capital on favorable terms, negative NPV projects from the perspective of the firm may be positive NPV projects from the perspective of current shareholders. The firm motivates the manager to take such projects by basing some compensation on the current stock price.     

Implicit Employment Contracts: The Limits of Management Reputation for Promoting Firm Productivity

Implicit employment contracts are a common way to motivate firm productivity but also require that employees trust management to be fair when allocating postproduction firm resources between employees and owners. We use an experiment to study the problem of motivating firm productivity, which depends on levels of owner investment and employee productive effort, when managers have an incentive to favor the owner's interests over those of the employee. Drawing on research in psychology and behavioral economics, we argue that reputation concerns can more effectively promote firm productivity when manager compensation is relatively insensitive to how much the owner is allocated after production occurs. Consistent with our predictions, we find that reputation concerns lead to greater firm productivity and higher payoffs for all firm members, but only when manager pay is relatively insensitive to the owner's ex post allocation. In addition to offering testable empirical implications, our theory and results are important because they can help explain why executive compensation is, in practice, surprisingly insensitive to owner returns.     

Investment Decisions and Managerial Performance Evaluation

This paper considers incentive provisions for a manager who makes investment decisions. The manager's performance measure can be based on current accounting information: cash flow, depreciation, book value, and current investment. We argue that Residual Income is the unique (linear) performance measure that achieves goal congruence, i.e., the manager accepts all positive NPV projects, and only those. If the manager has the same discount rate as the owner, the depreciation rules remain indeterminate. However, if the manager's discount rate assumes potentially a whole range of values, then a particular depreciation policy combined with Residual Income is the unique way to achieve goal congruence.     

The effects of costly exploration on optimal investment timing

This paper investigates a principal–agent model in which an owner (principal) optimizes a contract with a manager (agent) who has been delegated to undertake an investment project. In the model, we explore the effects of costly exploration by which the manager learns the real value of development cost. We show that high exploration cost can lead to a pooling policy not contingent on project type. Further, and more notably, we show that, in the presence of asymmetric information, higher exploration cost leads to wealth transfer from owner to manager and can ultimately improve social welfare.     

The accountability demand for information in China and the US – A research note

This study replicated Evans, Heiman-Hoffman and Rau’s (hereafter, EHR) [Evans, J. H., III, Heiman-Hoffman, V. B., & Rau, S. (1994). The accountability demand for information. Journal of Management Accounting Research, 6, 24–42] US study, using Chinese MBA students as participants. The Chinese students acted as owners and selected one of two control systems. One control system requires truthful reporting and the other control system permits the manager to falsify the report. The two systems have the same expected payoff to the owner if the owner believes that the manager will always lie when given the opportunity. If the owner believes that there is any probability that the manager will tell the truth, then the more Lenient System has the higher expected payoff. We compared the US versus Chinese control system choices, and examined whether the Chinese owner-participants would be willing to sacrifice wealth to get accountability. The results indicate that a significant proportion of Chinese participants do have an accountability demand for information, and that this proportion is at least as high as that of the US participants in EHR.     

Going-public vs. private sales: A two-tiered agency approach

This paper models a situation where an entrepreneur with assets in place and uncertain development opportunities decides whether to sell the business to public capital markets or to place it privately to a conglomerate. It finds that the two-tiered managerial hierarchy of a conglomerate is likely to cause more adverse effects of agency problem. Thus, going-public dominates private sales in motivating the entrepreneur to acquire more information about investment opportunities and in the profit performance of the business. The entrepreneur obtains less wealth if he sells the business privately at a price representing its profit potential when the entrepreneur and the manager of the conglomerate have the same managerial interests.     

Performance measurement for investment decisions under capital constraints

An owner delegates investment decisions to a better informed manager whose time preferences are unknown to the owner. Due to exogenous capital constraints, not all profitable projects can be undertaken, and therefore the owner wants the manager to select the NPV-maximizing set of projects. We show that the relative benefit cost allocation scheme proposed by prior literature does not solve this problem. Adopting the same information structure as in Rogerson (J Polit Econ 105, 770–795, 1997) and Reichelstein (Rev Account Stud 2, 157–180, 1997), we demonstrate how to obtain robust goal congruence using residual income. The resulting revenue recognition and cost allocation rules lead to a performance measure reflecting the expected NPV-ranking of projects in each and every period.

An intertemporal asset pricing model with stochastic consumption and investment opportunities

This paper derives a single-beta asset pricing model in a multi-good, continuous-time model with uncertain consumption-goods prices and uncertain investment opportunities. When no riskless asset exists, a zero-beta pricing model is derived. Asset betas are measured relative to changes in the aggregate real consumption rate, rather than relative to the market. In a single-good model, an individual's asset portfolio results in an optimal consumption rate that has the maximum possible correlation with changes in aggregate consumption. If the capital markets are unconstrained Pareto-optimal, then changes in all individuals' optimal consumption rates are shown to be perfectly correlated.     

The price of power: Valuing the controlling position of owner–managers in French IPO firms

Going public often creates an agency conflict between the owner–manager and minority shareholders. This problem is especially severe in countries with poor legal investor protection, such as France. We examine the controlling position of owner–managers in French initial public offering (IPO) firms. We find that investors anticipate the increased agency conflict associated with a lock on control and lower firm value when the owner–manager is more powerful. Shareholder agreements in which the owner–manager agrees to share control with other pre-IPO owners enhance firm value. We also report that higher cash flow ownership by the owner–manager is positively related to firm value when he is not in full control. Finally, we document that the large (non-pecuniary) private benefits of control in France may motivate owner–managers to retain control after the IPO.     

Corporate financing and investment decisions when firms have information that investors do not have

This paper considers a firm that must issue common stock to raise cash to undertake a valuable investment opportunity. Management is assumed to know more about the firm's value than potential investors. Investors interpret the firm's actions rationally. An equilibrium model of the issue-invest decision is developed under these assumptions. The model shows that firms may refuse to issue stock, and therefore may pass up valuable investment opportunities. The model suggests explanations for several aspects of corporate financing behavior, including the tendency to rely on internal sources of funds, and to prefer debt to equity if external financing is required. Extensions and applications of the model are discussed.     

Welfare Effects of Timely Reporting

A principal-agent model is examined in which a manager acquires private cost information sequentially. All possible communication schemes are equivalent to one of two: (1) timely reporting, where the manager reports as soon as possible, and (2) delayed reporting, where the manager delays the report of the first of two signals. In the primary case identified, timely reporting is shown to be owner valuable. However, the manager is better off under delayed reporting. Finally, total expected surplus is shown greater under delayed reporting. The owner's benefit from timely reporting is less than the manager's loss.