It has become increasingly popular in practice to implement incentive systems that create goal-congruent investment behaviour between central and divisional management. In the following paper, it is shown that only linear contracts enable goal-congruent investment decisions if central management...

In jüngerer Zeit werden im Rahmen der Investitionsbudgetierung zunehmend die Bedeutung wahrheitsinduzierender Budgetierungsverfahren wie des Groves-Mechanismus zur Überwindung von Anreizproblemen diskutiert. Charakteristisch für den Groves-Mechanismus ist, dass man bei der Performancemessung...

The prevalence of intermediaries (middlemen) in supply chains is often seen as a dying remnant of less efficient times. Despite predictions that supply chains will rapidly “cut out the middleman” as technological advances have eased logistics, middlemen have continued to thrive. In this...

Applying the Monti-Klein framework, we examine the optimal financing strategy of a fi rm that requires funding for individual projects at an imperfect credit market. In particular, we study under which circumstances the firm should raise debt for projects separately (decentralized funding) or...

This paper studies the influence of agency conflicts on the irreversibility effect. Using a dynamic variant of the static Baron and Myerson (Econometrica 50(4):911–930, <CitationRef CitationID="CR7">1982</CitationRef>) adverse selection model, we characterize under which circumstances the irreversibility effect arises in the presence...</citationref>

Applying a real option approach, this paper examines how asymmetric information alters key variables of a firm’s supplier switching process, such as the timing of contracting (hurried versus delayed contracting), transfer payments, set-up, switching, and abandonment decisions. In a symmetric...

We investigate how the organizational structure of a firm influences the decision making of its top management. Different organizational structures lead information to be processed in different ways by the individual decision makers, potentially creating an informational cascade within the...

This paper investigates the suitability of different performance measures to evaluate the performance of investment center managers, when intrafirm coordination problems arise between headquarters and divisional management. The performance measures analyzed are based on available accounting...

In vertical relationships, manufacturers commonly rely on retailers to sell their goods. In this note, we analyze a manufacturer-retailer relationship in which a manufacturer delegates the sale of his product to a retailer who gets sequentially private information about the retail value of the...

In the literature, the information structure of the hold-up problem is typically assumed to be exogenous. In this paper, we introduce an additional stage at which the head office may grant individual divisions access to an information system before they undertake their specific investments....