Several comparative cost management studies in Japan and the U.S., have suggested the superiority of long term managerial contracts using future-oriented measurements in reducing costs and increasing value. In this paper, we show that the optimal length of the contract offered a manager is...

In this paper, I examine issues relating to managers' ability to influence their performance evaluation. In contrast to conventional wisdom, I show that such influencing is not necessarily deleterious to shareholder welfare, despite the fact that it is aimed at maximizing the managers'...

We use a linear contracting framework to study how the relation between performance measures used in an agent's incentive contract and the agent's private pre-decision information affects the value of delegating decision rights to the agent. The analysis relies on the idea that available...

For cash flows in perpetuity without growth, analysts typically use the following formula for the return to levered equity Ke.lt;brgt;lt;brgt;Ke = Ku + (Ku shy; Kd)(1 shy; T)D/E (1) lt;brgt;lt;brgt;where Ku is the return to unlevered equity, Kd is the cost of debt, T is the tax rate, D is the...

Recent studies report an increasing use of nonfinancial measures such as product quality, customer satisfaction and market share in performance measurement an compensation systems. A growing literature suggests that nonfinancial performance measures are better predictors of long-term performance...

This paper empirically examines the determinants and performance effects of centrality bias and leniency bias. The results show that managers respond to their own incentives and preferences when subjectively evaluating performance. Specifically, information gathering costs and strong...

Implicit employment contracts are a common way to motivate firm productivity but also require that employees trust management to be fair when allocating post-production firm resources between employees and owners. We use an experiment to study the problem of motivating firm productivity, which...

Economic theory suggests that there are complementarities between the various components of a firm's organizational design (Milgrom and Roberts (1992)). With the exception of Nagar (2002) which examines the joint determination of two components of the management control system, incentive...