Managerial Motivation Dynamics and Incentives
研究企业如何通过绩效薪酬改变管理者的动机模式，发现降低风险厌恶或提高薪酬不一定能激励管理者，并识别出影响努力的关键因素，对设计激励合同有参考价值。
Firms can increase profitability by appropriately motivating managers. We investigate drivers of managerial motivation, and propose how firms can use performance pay to alter motivational patterns. We focus on the agent’s optimal effort decision in trading off compensation utility with effort cost in a static and dynamic setting. Surprisingly, we find that lower risk aversion or increased pay are not necessarily motivating factors, and identify the relevant effort drivers underlying the agent’s utility and compensation plan. We characterize properties of agents’ preferences for output lotteries (risk aversion, aggressiveness, prudence) that trigger systematic motivational patterns with respect to a variety of factors, such as the agent’s productivity and past performance, time to evaluation, the firm’s capabilities, and market factors. Our insights are robust, holding under very general modeling assumptions on preferences, rewards, and the stochastic effort-output function.