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...

How does imperfect contractibility of preferences influence the governance of a contractual relationship? We analyze a two-party decision-making problem where the optimal decision is unknown at the time of contracting. In consequence, instead of contracting on the decision directly, the parties...

Traditionally, researchers have had difficulty testing the relationship between the degree of risk or uncertainty in workers' environments and incentive pay. The authors employ Prendergast's (2002) theory that incorporates the delegation of worker authority into the principal-agent model to...

A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...

Compensation schemes have been blamed for encouraging excess risk-taking on the part of managers within the financial system and real economy. In general, compensation cannot decrease below the base salary, while gains from bonuses can be limitless. The potential link between compensation and...

We investigate the risk choices of risk averse CEOs. Following recent theoretical work, we expect CEO risk aversion to be more pronounced in firms with high leverage, or high default probability. We find that the CEOs of these firms reduce firm risk, even in the presence of strong risk taking...

Uncertainty has qualitatively different implications than risk in studying executive incentives. We study the interplay between profitability uncertainty and moral hazard, where profitability is multiplicative with managerial effort. Investors who face greater uncertainty desire faster learning,...

Uncertainty has qualitatively different implications than risk in studying executive incentives. We study the interplay between profitability uncertainty and moral hazard, where profitability is multiplicative with the managerial effort. Investors who face greater uncertainty desire faster...

I investigate the consequences of executive stock option (ESO) risk incentives on risk-taking and future stock returns, conditional on past firm performance. Prior research documents a positive relation between compensation convexity (captured by “vega,” the sensitivity of CEO wealth to...

A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...