Corporate scandals, reflected in excessive management compensation and fraudulent accounts, cause great damage. Agency theory’s insistence to link the compensation of mangers and directors as closely as possible to firm performance is a major reason for these scandals. They cannot be overcome...

In view of recent corporate scandals, it is argued that corporate governance can learn from public governance. Institutions devised to control and discipline the behavior of executives in the political sphere can give new insights into how to improve the governance of firms. Proposals in four...

The most influential theory of corporate governance, principal agency theory, does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overcome the widespread corporate scandals, the interests of...

This empirical note deals with the contractual design of relationships between producers and retailers. It provides evidence on the links between the features of vertical contracts organizing franchising networks and the performances of these networks. An agency perspective is used to understand...

This paper analyses optimal contracts in a principal-agent model where the agent is intrinsically motivated at the outset and there is an endogenous relationship between the structure of incentive payments and intrinsic motivation (crowding effects). The analysis shows that crowding effects have...

In this paper, we develop an agency-theoretic extension of the Lucas asset pricing model and examine the resulting asset price dynamics. In the model, an agent of the firm can expand or contract the firm’s output and dividend payments in response to exogenous shocks, although expansions become...

This article studies, from an agency perspective, the factors that explain the franchisor decision to integrate versus franchise its outlets. The analysis of a sample of Spanish franchise networks shows that franchising is more likely when: a) the costs of inefficient risk allocation between...

Agency theory emphasizes that separating ownership and control can lead to inefficiencies in corporations, but the literature on strategic delegation points out that the owner will profit from this separation due to advantages from self-commitment. In this paper, both literatures are combined....

This paper introduces and discusses an idea which minimizes gaming or manipulation activities, if payments are linked to results from manipulative methods. The idea is to add nonmanipulable information to manipulable information to improve the evaluation of a given output. A score declining in...