Between and within firms, work teams compete against each other and receive feedback on how well their team is performing relative to their benchmarks. In this paper we investigate experimentally how teams respond to relative performance feedback (RPF) at team level. We find that when subjects...

Understanding CEO compensation plans is a continuing challenge for directors and investors. The disclosure of these plans is dictated by SEC rules that rely heavily on the “fair value” of awards at the time they are granted. The problem with these numbers is that they are static and do not...

Influenced by their compensation plans, CEOs make their own luck through decisions that affect future firm risk. After adopting a relative performance evaluation (RPE) plan, total and idiosyncratic risk are higher, and the correlation between firm and industry performance is lower. The opposite...

In the empirical estimation of the relation between CEO pay and both firm and peer performance, researchers typically include conventional accounting-based measures that reflect firm performance net of executive pay expense. We analytically show that when firms evaluate CEO performance relative...

We investigate the role of Relative Performance Evaluation (RPE) theory in CEO pay and turnover using a product similarity-based definition of peers (Hoberg and Phillips 2016). RPE predicts that firms filter out common shocks (i.e., those affecting the firm and its peers) while evaluating CEO...

Executives are often paid for short-term changes in shareholder wealth, but rational shareholders want executives to maximize long-term shareholder wealth. Incentives for short-term and long-term oriented behavior may depend on an executive's level of pay in the distribution, holding other...