Competition and the Strategic Choice of Managerial Incentives: the Relative Performance Case

In this paper we study the role of market competitiveness in a strategic delegation game in which owners delegate output decisions to managers interested in the firm's relative performance. In particular we study how the optimal delegation scheme - i.e. the distortion from pure profit maximization - is affected by market concentration and the elasticity of market demand. We show that these two indexes of market competitiveness do not alter managerial incentives in the same way: while the optimal degree of delegation decreases as the market becomes less concentrated, it increases as demand becomes more elastic.