Health insurers often tie payments to providers' quality of care. Although payers do this to elicit more effort from providers, some providers may game the system by avoiding patients who would cause their quality scores to fall. We use annual variation in the criteria for Medicare's Quality...

This conference paper suggests that the problem of corporate ethics cannot be reduced to the autonomous person. Although the greatest influence on action and choice is one's moral constitution, it does not follow that the agent's behavior is the same within or without the firm. Ethics is a...

A robust result in the literature on strategic incentives pioneered by Fershtman and Judd (1987), Sklivas (1987), and Vickers (1985) is that under quantity competition firm owners induce their managers to make aggressive quantity choices in the product market. We revisit this result in a...

The relational contracts literature suggests that a principal can improve contract self-enforceability by specifying initial requirements that increase the agent's ex-post rents. Initial requirements specified in hotel franchise agreements — size and quality-tier of hotel — offer a unique...

It is a long-standing antitrust principle that agency relationships are exempt from price fixing violations. But the agency relationship must be "genuine." To discern genuine agency agreements, the prevailing approach adopted in both the United States and the EU focuses on whether the agent has...

We show that the vertical delegation of decision-making authority to agent firms can act as a credible strategic commitment even when contracts are unobservable (or renegotiable) if and only if multilateral delegation is combined with decentralized ownership of the agent firms. In this case, the...

The present study aims to examine the relationship between dividend policy and earnings management by explicitly considering the role of the agency problem and financing constraints. The sample comprises 3250 non-financial Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2018. This study uses fixed- and random...

Corporate scandals, reflected in excessive management compensation and fraudulent accounts, cause great damage. Agency theory’s insistence to link the compensation of mangers and directors as closely as possible to firm performance is a major reason for these scandals. They cannot be overcome...

The relationship between exorbitant chief executive officer (CEO) compensation and weak performance has been widely criticised as an abuse of managerial power and the intrusion of agency problems. This study examines whether the agency problem of free cash flow (FCF), identified by Jensen...