ON‐THE‐JOB SEARCH AND MORAL HAZARD

We analyze the interaction between intertemporal incentive contracts and search frictions associated with on‐the‐job search. In our model, agency problems call for wage contracts with deferred compensation. At the same time workers do on‐the‐job search. Deferred compensation improves workers' incentives to exert effort but distorts their on‐the‐job search decisions. We show that deferred compensation is less attractive when the value to the worker–firm pair of on‐the‐job search is high. Moreover, the interplay between search frictions and wage contracts creates feedback effects. If firms in equilibrium use contracts with deferred compensation, fewer firms with vacancies enter the on‐the‐job search market, and this in turn reduces the distortions created by deferred compensation. These feedback effects between the incentive contracts used and the activity level in the search markets can lead to multiple equilibria: a low‐turnover equilibrium where firms use deferred compensation, and a high‐turnover equilibrium where they do not. Furthermore, the model predicts that firms are more likely to use deferred compensation when search frictions are high and when the gains from on‐the‐job search are small.     

基于不公平厌恶或地位追求的创新顾客最优合同类型研究

本文首先从创新顾客的公平偏好程度、薪酬合同类型（最优激励系数）与激励机制效果的关系入手,引入公平偏好理论（不公平厌恶和地位追求）、相对绩效评估（RPE）和参与成本要素,构建顾客参与企业新产品开发的激励模型;其次,通过模型求解和分析,探讨分析各类薪酬合同中风险成本、不公平预期损失和激励效果之间的关系;最后,通过仿真实验验证并确定企业采用的创新顾客最优薪酬合同类型。研究发现：在同一薪酬合同下,创新顾客愈不在意其参与成本的投入,该合同的激励效果愈积极;关于创新顾客最优合同类型的选择,意味着求解一个三方面权衡,包括风险成本、不公平预期损失和公平偏好的激励效果;对于公平偏好程度较低的创新顾客,企业可采用相对绩效合同,例如锦标竞争合同;对于公平偏好程度较高的创新顾客,当其风险规避程度较高时,可采用团队报酬合同,当其风险规避程度较低时,可采用完美团队合同。     

DRIVE AND TALENT

We analyze ways in which heterogeneity in responsiveness to incentives (“drive”) affects employees' incentives and firms' incentive systems in a career concerns model. On the one hand, because more driven agents work harder in response to existing incentives than less driven ones—and therefore pay is increasing in perceived drive—there is a motive to increase effort to signal high drive. These “drive‐signaling incentives” are strongest with intermediate levels of existing incentives. On the other hand, because past output of a more driven agent will seem to the principal to reflect lower ability, there is an incentive to decrease effort to signal low drive. The former effect dominates early in the career, and the latter effect dominates towards the end. To maximize incentives, the principal wants to observe a noisy measure of the agent's effort—such as the number of hours he works—early but not late in his career. (JEL: C70, D82, D23)     

Get more for less? Experimental evidence on repeated decision making under non-monotone incentives

Summary  This paper presents experimental results of a benchmark study to analyze the incentive effects of non-monotone pay schemes. An incentive compatible contract that does not award the highest pay to the highest possible output combination was tested in a neutral, framing, and two framing-with-principal settings, respectively. The results confirm the model in a statistically significant way. Principals select the non-monotone contract over a monotone contract that would give them ex ante a lower expected surplus. Agents predominantly select the income-maximizing strategy, i.e. select the effort level that should be implemented by the contract. Given the widespread view that non-monotone output-contingent incentives are not plausible labor contracts, it seems worthwile to extend the experimental study to include aspects which are common in labor relations, such as an option to quit for the employee and repeated interaction between employer and employee. This would help answer the question whether theoretically optimal non-monotone contracts may be used as labor contracts. The author acknowledges insightful comments by Jeannette Brosig, Alexis Kunz, Thomas Riechmann, Dirk Sliwka, Joachim Weimann and two anonymous referees. Financial support by MaxLab is gratefully acknowledged. Any remaining errors are my own.     

An Efficient Dynamic Mechanism

This paper constructs an efficient, budget‐balanced, Bayesian incentive‐compatible mechanism for a general dynamic environment with quasilinear payoffs in which agents observe private information and decisions are made over countably many periods. First, under the assumption of “private values” (other agents' private information does not directly affect an agent's payoffs), we construct an efficient, ex post incentive‐compatible mechanism, which is not budget‐balanced. Second, under the assumption of “independent types” (the distribution of each agent's private information is not directly affected by other agents' private information), we show how the budget can be balanced without compromising agents' incentives. Finally, we show that the mechanism can be made self‐enforcing when agents are sufficiently patient and the induced stochastic process over types is an ergodic finite Markov chain.     

Moral Hazard Contracting and Private Credit Markets

This paper studies the impact of credit markets on optimal contracting, when the agent's “interim preference” over upcoming contracts is private information because personal financial decisions affect it via the wealth effect. The main result is a severe loss of incentive provision: equilibrium contracts invariably cause the agent to shirk (i.e., exert minimal effort) if the agent's private financial decision precedes moral hazard contracting. The basic intuition is that committing on another private variable, other than the effort level, exposes the parties to further exploitation of efficient risk‐sharing by relaxing the incentive constraint that was binding ex ante, unless the risk‐sharing was fully efficient to begin with.     

Robustly Collusion‐Proof Implementation

A contract with multiple agents may be susceptible to collusion. We show that agents' collusion imposes no cost in a large class of circumstances with risk neutral agents, including both uncorrelated and correlated types. In those circumstances, any payoff the principal can attain in the absence of collusion, including the second‐best level, can be attained in the presence of collusion in a way robust to many aspects of collusion behavior. The collusion‐proof implementation generalizes to a setting in which only a subset of agents may collude, provided that noncollusive agents' incentives can be protected via an ex post incentive compatible and ex post individually rational mechanism. Our collusion‐proof implementation also sheds light on the extent to which hierarchical delegation of contracts can optimally respond to collusion.     

Fairness and Contract Design

We show experimentally that fairness concerns may have a decisive impact on the actual and optimal choice of contracts in a moral hazard context. Bonus contracts that offer a voluntary and unenforceable bonus for satisfactory performance provide powerful incentives and are superior to explicit incentive contracts when there are some fair‐minded players, but trust contracts that pay a generous wage up front are less efficient than incentive contracts. The principals understand this and predominantly choose the bonus contracts. These results are consistent with recently developed theories of fairness, which offer important new insights into the interaction of contract choices, fairness, and incentives.     

冗余资源配置条件下的企业技术创新激励合约研究

基于多任务委托代理模型的分析框架,建立了企业同时采用新增资源投入和搜寻企业冗余资源进行技术创新的信息不对称条件下的委托代理模型。通过对模型的分析,得出了企业技术创新所需的新增资源和冗余资源投入的优化配置条件,以及2种资源组合配置模式下的企业员工技术创新活动的最优激励合同条件。企业可以根据新增资源的边际收益、边际成本,以及各行动之间成本函数的相互依存性的不同组合,采取适度激励、重度强化激励、轻度强化激励、重度弱化激励和轻度弱化激励等优化激励组合方案来激励员工进行技术创新活动,从而使企业技术创新资源的配置有更多优化方案选择,以降低企业创新的风险和成本,提高资源效率和创新绩效。     

Do ‘soft law’ board gender quotas work? Evidence from a natural experiment

In a new era of “open governance”, in which societal and corporate change is taking place, 15 predominantly European countries, including Spain, enacted board gender quotas to increase the share of women on boards. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of the European Union’s first “soft” quota – the 2007 Spanish Gender Equality Act recommending all large public and private Spanish firms to appoint a target of 40 percent of each gender to serve as board directors by 2015. The Act provides an incentive in that quota compliant firms may receive a preference for the tendering of public contracts. We draw on institutional and resource dependency theories to motivate the first empirical test of a “soft” quota which is distinct from Norway’s “hard law” board gender quota, and more similar to the proposed EU-wide quota. Using a large novel panel of 767 Spanish firms and 2786 firm-year observations from 2005 to 2014, we exploit the Spanish Act as a natural experiment and employ a difference-in-differences model. We find that less than nine percent of targeted firms fully comply with the quota. Firms that depend on public contracts are significantly more likely to increase female representation, although quota compliant firms do not actually benefit from the Act’s potential incentive. The results highlight the Spanish government’s lack of commitment to the quota, and that the quota’s normative obligations did not trigger the adoption of gender-balanced boards.     

CEO Incentives,Takeover Protection and Corporate Innovation

This study examines the effects of CEO equity‐based compensation and anti‐takeover provisions on corporate innovation. Using a large sample of US firms over the period 1996–2014, we find that long‐term incentives have a stronger influence on innovation when combined with takeover threats. We also show that equity‐based compensation is more likely to spur innovation for small firms and firms in industries with high product market competition and innovation pressure. However, this effect is somewhat weaker in the presence of anti‐takeover provisions, suggesting that takeover protection encourages managerial shirking even when external competition is high. Finally, in addition to the existing evidence on the valuation effect of CEO equity‐based compensation, we identify innovation as an important channel through which managerial incentives can enhance firm value. Our results have potential implications for shareholders, managers and policymakers.     

Supply Chain Structure Incentives for Corporate Social Responsibility: An Incomplete Contracting Analysis

Downstream firms increasingly recognize the importance of integrating social and environmental concerns with their businesses. As a consequence, they urge to create incentives for their suppliers to invest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Contracts to provide these incentives are rarely observed in practice. If not totally absent, contracts may be incomplete, in that unforeseen contingencies or some CSR attributes that are difficult to measure may not be included in the contract. We show that incentives for CSR investments can also be provided through the supply chain structure, which consists of the distribution of ownership rights over the firms' assets of production, and involves horizontal and/or vertical alliances among supply chain members. Motivated by examples in agricultural contexts, this study adopts the property rights approach to study the impact of supply chain structures on the adoption of CSR activities. We show that the structure that best incentivizes CSR investments depends on the interaction between CSR vertical synergy, free‐riding, and countervailing power. One of the main findings is that the alliance between suppliers is beneficial only if the revenues generated by a downstream investment are sufficiently high. In fact, only in this case, the suppliers can appropriate a sufficiently large stake of the revenues generated downstream, thanks to their countervailing power. When the upstream investment costs become high, however, the suppliers will invest in CSR only if the downstream distributor is vertically integrated. The resulting structure of a cooperative will best incentivize CSR investments only if the CSR vertical synergy between the two tiers of the supply chain is sufficiently high.     

THE RATIONALE FOR INCENTIVE CONTRACTING*

The incentive-type fee function (which has supplanted the Cost-Plus-Fixed-Fee arrangements of a decade ago) provides an excellent medium for achieving “fee flexibility” or, more exactly, for increasing the fee outcome on government contracts. The originators of incentive contracting stumbled unwittingly on a method for negotiating acceptable fee arrangements under conditions of uncertainty, and the primary purpose of this paper is to establish apodictically that incentive contracts (whether single or multiple) can and do provide the contractor with a method for securing a fee arrangement preferable to that obtainable through a CPFF or a FP (Fixed-Price) contract. Furthermore, this characteristic of incentive contracts can be demonstrated through the use of elementary decision theory. The incentive fee structure provides the contractor with a long-needed procedure for optimizing the expected utility of the fee outcome, and an appreciation of this property should be of value to both contractors and procurement officials with the authority for designing new contract fee arrangements. The paper does not investigate procedures for the optimal negotiation of contracts; rather, it identifies a feature of the incentive contract which appears to be the primary basis for its use and popularity. Our thesis is applicable to both single and multiple incentive contracts. For reasons of simplicity, however, the analysis has been largely confined to the former type of fee arrangement.     

分布式领导、组织支持感与新生代员工主动性-被动性创新行为:基于上下级关系和价值观匹配的交互调节效应

新生代员工正逐渐成为企业的主力军,其创新意识和行为直接影响着企业发展的前景与未来。本文基于中国文化和组织情境,从员工个体创新动机视角将新生代员工创新行为归为主动和被动,以306名新生代员工为研究对象,验证了分布式领导对新生代员工不同性质创新行为的作用机制。研究结果表明:分布式领导与新生代员工主动性创新行为呈正相关关系,与其被动性创新行为呈负相关关系;组织支持感在分布式领导与新生代员工主动性-被动性创新行为之间具有中介作用;上下级关系和价值观匹配正向调节分布式领导与新生代员工组织支持感之间的关系,并进一步检验了有调节的中介效应。此外,上下级关系和价值观匹配的交互项调节了分布式领导与新生代员工组织支持感之间的关系。本文研究为企业如何指导新生代员工进行有效的创新实践提供了经验证据。     

工程质量优化的承包商群体激励效率演化分析

针对业主与多标段承包商群体的一对多结构,考虑业主如何通过单价合同与收益共享合同所组成的菜单合同模式对承包商群体进行激励以优化工程质量。本文构建了单阶段群体激励模型以及考虑承包商个体存在公平感知的多阶段群体激励模型,通过计算实验方法探讨不同报酬结构下的激励效率及其演化。研究表明:业主实行同一报酬结构在多阶段工程建设中难以维持高效率;单阶段激励中较好的报酬结构并不适用于多阶段激励过程;个体的公平感知对激励绩效会产生负面影响;报酬结构中针对不同质量标准的激励力度均会对激励效率产生影响,仅针对单一激励力度进行调整或忽视激励力度间的协同均不能实现较好的激励效果。     

Efficient Labour Contracts: Impediments and How to Circumvent Them

Efficient labour contracts on wages and employment could contribute to a reduction in unemployment in Europe. Their implementation is hindered by institutional settings and asymmetric incentives at different levels of the bargaining process. Employed workers have no incentives to forego wage increases at the firm level for potential employment gains, while employers’ federations possess no means to guarantee an employment increase for the sector covered by a wage agreement. Decentralization of wage bargaining does not solve this incentive problem. It is demonstrated that the introduction of marketable certificates may reduce the asymmetric incentive effects enabling contracts with higher employment.     

权威董事专业性、高管激励与创新活跃度研究

通过我国A股上市公司2007年～2015年的数据, 实证检验了权威专业董事通过高管激励影响创新活跃度的逻辑链条.发现权威专业董事通过影响高管激励的结构与水平增强了企业创新的活跃度, 且不同类别的权威专业董事均能够产生积极作用.这种影响不仅促进了企业的实质性创新, 提升了企业的创新效率, 并使之具有可持续性.研究结论在对主要变量采取不同度量方式以及控制了内生性等因素影响的情况下依然成立.本文的研究结论拓展了权威专业董事职能发挥的途径, 增补了上市公司高管激励的经验证据, 同时, 为董事会治理有效性的识别提供了新的视角.对于当前企业高管创新激励机制的匹配性设计, 以及监管部门完善董事会治理规则具有一定的借鉴意义.     

EVIDENCE FOR RELATIONAL CONTRACTS IN SOVEREIGN BANK LENDING

This paper presents direct evidence for relational contracts in sovereign bank lending. Unlike the existing empirical literature, its instrumental variables method allows for distinguishing a direct influence of past repayment problems on current spreads (a “punishment” effect in prices) from an indirect effect through higher expected future default probabilities (“loss of reputation”). Such a punishment provides positive surplus to lenders after a default and decreases the borrower's present discounted value of the net benefits of future borrowing, which create dynamic incentives. Using data on bank loans to developing countries for 1973–1981 and constructing continuous variables for credit history, we find evidence that most of the influence of past repayment problems is through the direct, punishment channel.     

裁员视角下人力资源的有效激励与代理成本分析

在假定产出可以观测的条件下,构造含裁员概率的企业与员工之间的委托-代理激励模型,把企业的裁员概率与员工的实际业绩结合起来,针对员工素质类型是对称信息和非对称信息,分别探讨含产出-工资合同的企业激励机制设计,比较两种不同信息结构下不同激励效应,分析非对称信息下实施合同的代理成本.     

虚拟品牌社区中内、外部激励对顾客契合的影响研究

从认知学派削弱论剖析出“侵蚀”视角,基于自我决定理论,构建一个以顾客参与、顾客信任和顾客认同为中介的链式中介模型,探究内、外部激励对顾客契合的影响机制,以及内、外部激励间是否存在“侵蚀”效用。运用层次回归法和Bootstrap法对数据进行分析,研究发现:①内、外部激励之间存在“侵蚀”效用,且对内、外部激励存在“单独拉升-总体抑制”效果;②激励措施不能单独通过顾客参与作用于顾客契合,顾客参与和顾客契合路径还有中介变量待发掘;③“顾客参与—顾客信任”和“顾客参与—顾客认同”链式中介作用显著。