We examine the impact of overconfidence on compensation structure. We test alternative hypotheses, drawing upon and extending existing theories. Our findings support the exploitation hypothesis: firms offer incentive-heavy compensation contracts to overconfident CEOs to exploit their...

We study pay spillovers within the network of peer compensation benchmarking and show that these can reconcile growth differences and convergence in CEO compensation. Specifically, compensation of a small group of prominent, highly-central network firms is shown to have a substantial spillover...