Short-Termism as a Rule: the Effects of Portfolio Management Delegation

Because of their governance, investors are not able to develop long-term investment policies. While they have been outsourcing investment decision making to asset management firms and evaluation to intermediaries (consulting firms and credit rating agencies), they have contributed to the creation of markets of providers which are dominated by the logic of short-term profit. The dictates of performances comparison and competition have fostered evaluation of providers through synthetic indexes. These provide an abstract representation of economic activity that hinders alternative representations, specific to long-term investors. These various practises have been institutionalized into legitimate norms hard to be challenged.