The Impact of Performance Measure Discriminability on Ratee Incentives
研究发现绩效衡量指标的可区分性越强，代理人绩效提升越明显；主观指标因可区分性不足而激励效果劣于客观指标，且两者可区分性差距越大，主观指标的劣势越突出。
ABSTRACT: The literature addresses optimal contract design issues that the principal must address to provide proper incentives to the agent. However, there has been limited empirical assessment of how agents actually respond to the performance-evaluation schemes in the contracts offered them. Moreover, the literature overlooks factors, other than those from the pay-for-performance context, that may impact the effectiveness of incentive provisions. This study considers the effect of discriminability on agent performance. We find that (1) agent performance improvement is positively associated with the degree of discriminability, (2) subjective measures are inferior to objective measures in providing incentives to the agent because of the lack of discriminability, and (3) the inferiority of subjective measures for incentive purposes is exacerbated in circumstances in which the discriminability gap between objective and subjective measures is significant. Our findings suggest that, in order to have subjective measures effectively complement objective measures, the accounting profession must develop sound performance measurement systems that define and measure subjective performance with sufficient discriminability.