The negative effects of common ownership on competition have received significant attention, but many proposed mechanisms for institutional investor influence seem implausible. We develop and test an analytical model of optimal compensation in an oligopoly with common ownership, focusing on...

Relative performance evaluation (“RPE”) is a useful tool for shielding risk averse agents from systematic uncertainty. However, RPE can also destroy firm value by encouraging executives to implement excessively aggressive product market strategies to improve their relative standing through...

Many firms use relative stock performance to evaluate and incentivize their CEOs. We provide evidence that these firms routinely disclose information that harms peers’ stock prices. Consistent with deliberate sabotage, peer-harming disclosures appear to be aimed at the peers whose stock price...

Using a high-granularity dataset containing retail prices for ~300,000 products spanning ~1,000 narrowly-defined product categories, I examine how product prices relate to the performance metrics used in CEO pay plans. Firms with large market shares reduce their product prices when the CEO is...