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Managerial Incentive Problems: A Dynamic Perspective
Bengt Holmstrom,Bengt Holmstrom +1 more
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The authors studied how a person's concern for a future career may influence his or her incentives to put in effort or make decisions on the job, and found that career motives can be beneficial as well as detrimental, depending on how well the two kinds of capital returns are aligned.Abstract:
The paper studies how a person's concern for a future career may influence his or her incentives to put in effort or make decisions on the job. In the model, the person's productive abilities are revealed over time through observations of performance. There are no explicit output contingent contracts, but since the wage in each period is based on expected output and expected output depends on assessed ability, an implicit contact' links today's performance to future wages. An incentive problem arises from the person's ability and desire to influence the learning process, and therefore the wage process, by taking unobserved actions that affect today's performance. The fundamental incongruity in preferences is between the individual's concern for human capital returns and the firm's concern for financial returns. The two need to be only weakly related. It is shown that career motives can be beneficial as well as detrimental, depending on how well the two kinds of capital returns are aligned.read more
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The Provision of Incentives in Firms
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References
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The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a struggling attempt to give structure to the statement: "Business in under-developed countries is difficult"; in particular, a structure is given for determining the economic costs of dishonesty.
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Agency Problems and the Theory of the Firm
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explain how the separation of security ownership and control, typical of large corporations, can be an efficient form of economic organization, and set aside the presumption that a corporation has owners in any meaningful sense.
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Moral Hazard and Observability
TL;DR: In this article, the role of imperfect information in a principal-agent relationship subject to moral hazard is considered, and a necessary and sufficient condition for imperfect information to improve on contracts based on the payoff alone is derived.
Posted Content
The Economic Theory of Agency: The Principal's Problem.
TL;DR: The canonical agency problem can be posed as follows as discussed by the authors : the agent may choose an act, aCA, a feasible action space, and the random payoff from this act, w(a, 0), will depend on the random state of nature O(EQ the state space set), unknown to the agent when a is chosen.
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The determination of financial structure: the incentive-signalling approach
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that if managers possess inside information about the activities of firms, then the choice of a managerial incentive schedule and of a financial structure signals information to the market, and in competitive equilibrium the inferences drawn from the signals will be validated.