‘Green’ managerial delegation theory

This article develops a non-cooperative game with managerial quantity-setting firms in which owners choose whether to delegate output and abatement decisions to managers through a contract based on emissions (conventionally denoted as ‘green’ delegation, GD) instead of sales (sales delegation, SD), and the government levies an emissions tax to incentivise firms’ emissions-reduction actions. First, it compares the Nash equilibrium outcomes between GD and SD and then contrasts them also with profit maximisation (PM). A plethora of Nash equilibria emerges, especially in the case GD versus PM (the ‘green delegation game’), depending on the public awareness toward environmental quality, ranging from the coordination game to the ‘green’ prisoner's dilemma. Second, though the contract under GD incentivises managers for emissions, the environmental damage is lower than under SD. This is because the optimal tax more than compensates the incentive for emissions. These findings suggest that designing GD contracts paradoxically favours environmental quality.

Regular Equilibria and Negative Welfare Implications in Delegation Games

This study examines delegation games in which each player commits to a reaction function in advance. We focus on the regular subgame perfect equilibria of delegation games in the sense that the chosen reaction functions have an invertible Jacobian. Subsequently we provide a necessary condition under which an action profile is achieved as a regular equilibrium of n-player delegation games. In two-player games with misaligned preferences, each efficient action profile violates the necessary condition. We also show that almost action profiles other than efficient ones are achieved as regular equilibria of the delegation game in which the chosen reaction functions are linear. This finding implies that each delegatee’s objective is written as a quadratic function, which may justify the linear-quadratic specification of the objective functions in applications.

The Lure of Authority: Motivation and Incentive Effects of Power

Authority and power permeate political, social, and economic life, but empirical knowledge about the motivational origins and consequences of authority is limited. We study the motivation and incentive effects of authority experimentally in an authority-delegation game. Individuals often retain authority even when its delegation is in their material interest—suggesting that authority has nonpecuniary consequences for utility. Authority also leads to overprovision of effort by the controlling parties, while a large percentage of subordinates underprovide effort despite pecuniary incentives to the contrary. Authority thus has important motivational consequences that exacerbate the inefficiencies arising from suboptimal delegation choices. (JEL C92, D23, D82)