There is now extensive empirical evidence showing that fund managers have relative performance objectives and adapt their investment strategy in the last part of the calendar year to their performance in the early part of the year. However, emphasis was put on returns in excess of some exogenous...

We study delegated portfolio management when the agent controls the riskiness of the portfolio. Under general conditions, we show that the optimal contract is simply a bonus contract: the agent is paid a fixed sum if the portfolio return is above a threshold. We derive a criterion to decide...