Unintended consequences of outcome based compensation – How CEO bonuses, stocks and stock options affect their firms' patent litigation
研究了CEO基于结果的薪酬（奖金、股票、股票期权）如何影响公司发起专利诉讼的可能性，发现股票薪酬增加诉讼概率，而奖金和股票期权降低概率，基于1997-2015年2302家美国公司的数据。
Enforcing a firm's patents is crucial for defending its competitive advantage. CEOs are central for making these strategic decisions but we know little about how their individual incentives shape their decision-making. We integrate theory from outcome-based CEO compensation designs into models explaining firms' decisions to become plaintiffs in patent litigation. Based on how compensation shapes time horizons and risk-taking of CEOs, we predict that CEO compensation tied to stock increases the firm's likelihood to enforce patents, while bonuses and stock options reduce it. Further, we reason that the tenacity of patent disputes in an industry creates a boundary condition for the effects of CEO compensation because they curtail the degree of agency that CEOs have for incorporating their personal incentives when making litigation decisions for the firm. We test these hypotheses for 2302 US firms with 4420 different CEOs and 3451 patent litigation cases between 1997 and 2015 and find support for all hypotheses with the exception of the boundary condition for stocks as CEO compensation. These findings advance existing theory on firms' decision-making on patent litigation by explicating how firm and CEO incentives can diverge with direct consequences for the likelihood of litigation to occur.