Product market competition and organizational slack under profit-target contracts

Salvatore Piccolo (), Marcello D'Amato and Riccardo Martina

International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2008, vol. 26, issue 6, 1389-1406

Abstract: In a framework à la Martin (1993) we introduce a common component in the managers' private information in order to address three related questions: What is the impact of contracts that reward managers on the basis of realized profits on firms' productive and allocative efficiency relative to cost-target contracts? How do these contracts shape the relationship between competition and organizational slack? Can we then explain the existing evidence of an inverted-U shaped relationship between competition and cost-reducing activities, as documented in Aghion et al. [Aghion, P., Bloom, N., Blundell, R., Griffith, R., Howitt, P., "Competition and innovation: an inverted-U Relationship", The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120: pp. 701-728, 2005]? We show that profit-target contracts introduce a horizontal (contractual) externality between the competing firms that mitigates organizational slack and improves upon productive efficiency relative to cost-plus mechanisms. Moreover, when executive compensations are conditioned on profits, an inverted-U shaped relationship between product market competition and managerial effort obtains. Finally, we also show that when contractual instruments are endogenous, i.e., when shareholders can choose between profit- and cost-target rules, the equilibrium with profit-target contracts always exists and is the only one that survives to standard refinements.

Keywords: Competing-contracts; Product; market; competition; X-inefficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-7187(08)00026-X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:indorg:v:26:y:2008:i:6:p:1389-1406

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Industrial Organization is currently edited by P. Bajari, B. Caillaud and N. Gandal

More articles in International Journal of Industrial Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().