Tournament Rewards and Risk Taking

Abstract

I consider two seemingly unrelated puzzles. 1.Why is relative performance evaluation (RPE) used less in CEO compensation than agency theory suggests? 2.Why is sometimes, e.g., for fund managers, a 'modest' performance more highly rewarded than 'very high' performances? I consider a simple tournament model where agents can influence the spread of output in addition to its mean. I show that standard tournament rewards induce risky and lazy behavior from the agents. This finding sheds light on Puzzle 1. Second, I consider a scheme that ranks agents according to their relative closeness to a benchmark k. I show that there exists intermediate values of k such that the risky-lazy problem of the standard tournament can be mitigated, and first best level of effort can be implemented. This result sheds light on Puzzle 2.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 278 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.