The Market Mechanism as an Incentive Scheme

Oliver Hart

Bell Journal of Economics, 1983, vol. 14, issue 2, 366-382

Abstract: It is often argued that competition in the product market reduces managerial slack. We formalize this idea. Suppose that there is a common component to firms' costs, i.e., as one firm's (total and marginal) costs fall, so do those of other firms. Then when costs fall, profit-maximizing firms expand. This reduces product prices and gives the manager of a nonprofit-maximizing firm less opportunity for discretionary behavior than if his firm's costs had fallen alone and produce prices had not changed. Hence average managerial slack is lower under competition than if there is a single nonprofit-maximizing monopolistic firm.

Date: 1983
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (556)

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0361-915X%2819832 ... O%3B2-2&origin=repec full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

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:rje:bellje:v:14:y:1983:i:autumn:p:366-382

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://editorialexp ... i-bin/rje_online.cgi

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Bell Journal of Economics from The RAND Corporation
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().