Investments and Risk Transfers
研究了部门经理在道德风险下合作时，关系专用投资如何通过扩大经营规模增加经理承担的风险，并发现投资与风险之间的关联推翻了不完全契约研究的传统结论。
ABSTRACT We demonstrate a novel link between relationship-specific investments and risk in a setting where division managers operate under moral hazard and collaborate on joint projects. Specific investments increase efficiency at the margin. This expands the scale of operations and thereby adds to the compensation risk borne by the managers. Accounting for this investment/risk link overturns key findings from prior incomplete contracting studies. We find that if the investing manager has full bargaining power vis-à-vis the other manager, he will underinvest relative to the benchmark of contractible investments; with equal bargaining power, however, he may overinvest. The reason is that the investing manager internalizes only his own share of the investment-induced risk premium (we label this a “risk transfer”), whereas the principal internalizes both managers' incremental risk premia. We show that high pay-performance sensitivity (PPS) reduces the managers' incentives to invest in relationship-specific assets. The optimal PPS, thus, trades off investment and effort incentives.