Incentives for innovation and centralized versus delegated capital budgeting

Sunil Dutta and Qintao Fan

Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2012, vol. 53, issue 3, 592-611

Abstract: We study a setting wherein a divisional manager undertakes personally costly effort to improve the profitability of an investment project. The manager's choice of innovation effort is subject to a holdup problem because of the ex post opportunism on the part of headquarters. We analyze and contrast the performance of centralized and delegated forms of investment decision-making. We find that delegation improves the manager's innovation incentives. We identify conditions for each of the two organizational forms to emerge as the optimal choice, and relate these conditions to characteristics of firms' investment opportunity sets.

Keywords: Capital budgeting; Centralization; Delegation; Innovation; Holdup problem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 G31 G32 G34 L22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165410112000213
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:jaecon:v:53:y:2012:i:3:p:592-611

DOI: 10.1016/j.jacceco.2012.01.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Accounting and Economics is currently edited by J. L. Zimmerman, S. P. Kothari, T. Z. Lys and R. L. Watts

More articles in Journal of Accounting and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().