In this paper, the principal rewards an agent's farsighted effort both in the short- and long-term, with the short-term reward based on a noisy, forward-looking performance measure and the long-term reward based on a potentially less noisy, trailing performance measure. The main result is that...

To address agents' moral hazard over effort, incentive contracts impose risk on the agents. As performance measures become noisier, the conventional agency analysis predicts that principals will reduce the incentive weights assigned to such measures. However, prior empirical results (Prendergast...

This paper make four important contributions to the accounting literature. First, it shows that discretionary accruals are associated with CEO cash compensation, but that the coefficient is significantly less than that on nondiscretionary accruals. Second, a differential reaction is found to...

We examine the economic consequences of the recent adoption of SFAS 123(R) in the United States. Consistent with the conjectures of prior research, our results show that the removal of favorable accounting treatment for stock options post SFAS 123(R) results in a switch from stock options to...

I study the consequences of a random exposure to common risk for the purpose of relative performance evaluation (RPE) and find that it significantly affects the usefulness and the empirical measurement of RPE. According to my analysis, the magnitude of the exposure risk not only determines how...

This study explores the effect of employee organizational identity on developing effective compensation contracts to improve organizational performance. We adopt the economic identity theory to mathematically model and test this model using data from a Japanese listed firm that uses an...

Top management faces two key organizational design choices: (1) how much authority to delegate to lower-level managers, and (2) how to design incentive compensation to ensure that these managers do not misuse their discretion. Although theoretical accounting literature has emphasized the joint...

This study uses principal agent analysis to investigate how the principal’s use of performance measures in the agent’s compensation contract are affected by (1) links between performance measures and (2) substitute and complementary characteristics of an agent’s efforts. We show that the...

We consider a single-principal/multi-agent model to investigate the principal's preferences over delegated contracting. The analysis extends the single-agent/multi-task LEN model in Feltham and Xie (1994) to a multi-agent/multi-task context. We consider full-commitment contracts, i.e., the...

This paper reviews agency theory and its application to accounting issues. I discuss the formulation of models of incentive problems caused by moral hazard and adverse selection problems. I review theoretical research on the role of performance measures in compensation contracts, and I compare...