I study the consequences of a random exposure to common risk for the purpose of relative performance evaluation (RPE) and find that it significantly affects the usefulness and the empirical measurement of RPE. According to my analysis, the magnitude of the exposure risk not only determines how...

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...

Top management faces two key organizational design choices: (1) how much authority to delegate to lower-level managers, and (2) how to design incentive compensation to ensure that these managers do not misuse their discretion. Although theoretical accounting literature has emphasized the joint...

This study uses principal agent analysis to investigate how the principal’s use of performance measures in the agent’s compensation contract are affected by (1) links between performance measures and (2) substitute and complementary characteristics of an agent’s efforts. We show that the...

In this paper, we investigate the role of financial incentives and social incentives in multi-task settings where the agent makes an effort level choice and an effort allocation choice. We focus on a setting where these choices are not independent and an active trade-off between effort level and...

This paper examines the role of multiple measures of performance in a principal-agent model incorporating both moral hazard and adverse selection. The outcome of interest to the principal depends stochastically on the agent’s unobservable ability and effort, while the principal implements a...

This study examines the behavioral impact of an information system, and how that impact varies with the information system's precision, in an internal reporting environment. In order to examine behavioral effects, we do not permit the owner to contract on the system's output. We propose that a...

This paper shows that in a model of managerial delegation in duopoly market structure, if the managers' salary varies with the incentive schemes offered by the owners, then the well-known results of equilibrium incentive scheme (by Fershtman and Judd, 1987, A.E.R.) get modified. In case of...

We propose an analytical model that integrates two parallel independent streams of the literature, agency theory and organizational control theory. In doing so, we provide new insights into agency theory by introducing the concept of a congruent agent, and new insights into organizational...

The paper Asymmetric Information, Incentives and Intrafirm Resource Allocation, by Harris, Kriebel and Raviv (H.K.R.), was published in the June 1982 issue of Management Science. In this article, written as part of this journal's 50-year anniversary celebration, we highlight the significance of...