In contrast to authoritative budgeting, participative budgeting may improve the superior's knowledge and increase the subordinate's motivation, but often comes at the costs of padding budgets and slack building. Consequently, most analytical studies identify slack as one of the major costs of...

In this note we reconsider the paper of Zhang and Zhang (1997), published in Managerial and Decision Economics, who analyze a strategic delegation model with R&D spillovers in an imperfectly competitive market. We were motivated to study their setup by a puzzling result given in their paper:...