This paper determines which individual variables actually driveexercise patterns and how employees value their stock options.

Residual income valuation is based on the assumption that the clean surplusrelation holds. As pointed out by Ohlson (2000), among others, the standardclean surplus relation is frequently violated. Moreover, standard residualincome valuation models rest on the implicit assumption that future...

As firms implement tournament bonus reward schemes, mainly the idea is to introduce competition amongst their agents in the order to promote their performance.Tournaments in which agents compete for a bonus by investing effort, are frequentlyapplied, e.g., in development races, political...

When two or more agents compete for a bonus and the agents' productivity in each of several possible occurrences depends stochastically on (constant) effort, the number of times that are checked to assign the bonus affects the level of un-certainty in the selection process. Uncertainty, in turn,...

This paper addresses the question, what metrics should be used for performance evaluationand in particular how they should be weighted and combined in the presence oftechnological interdependencies when the agents exhibit variedly strong developed rivalry.1 It is further examined, whether the...

Incentives often fail in inducing economic agents to engage in a desirableactivity; implementability is restricted. What restricts implementability?When does re-organization help to overcome this restriction?This paper shows that any restriction of implementabilityis caused by an identification...

The discussion on value-based performance measures is centered around the concept of residualincome. The main property of residual income is its connection to capital budgeting and the net-present-value-rule. This property is, however, not sufficient to guarantee strong goal congruencebetween...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insuranceand a “good” allocation of effort across various tasks is oftenidentified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision,signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity(congruity,...

This paper determines the cost of employee stock options (ESOs) to shareholders. I present a pricing method that seeks to replicate the empirics of exercise and cancellation as good as possible. In a first step, an intensity-based pricing model of El Karoui and Martellini is adapted to the needs...