...Principal-agent problems arise through the misalignment of interests between individuals or groups within an organisation. They can occur in various parts of an organisational structure, for instance in Labour; between an employer and an employee, Franchises; the franchisor and franchisee, Regulation; the regulator and the regulated company through to Investors; between the Shareholders and company Executives (Fingleton, J. 2012) The strength and alignment of these relationships are vital for the smooth successful operation of organisations, problems can occur in both the public sector in healthcare through doctor-patient-pharmaceutical company relationships and also in government, whilst more commonly known in the private sector through labour and investor related problems. This report will evaluate the effects of the principal-agent problem within firms by considering real world examples of where they may have occurred and what methods organisations use to address the issue. Empirical Evidence Empirical evidenceThere is however considerable empirical evidence of a positive effect of compensation on performance (although the studies usually involve “simple” jobs where aggregate measures of performance are available, which is where piece rates should be most effective). In one study, Lazear (1996) saw productivity rising by 44% (and wages by 10%) in a change from salary to piece rates, with a half of the productivity gain due to worker selection effects. Research shows...
Words: 1571 - Pages: 7
...delegates work to another party, the agent who performs that work. In the context of corporation, the agents are the managers and the principals are the shareholders. Agency theory as related to the corporation is set in the context of the separation of ownership and control as described in the work of Berle and Means (1932) Agency relationship Agency relationship is defined by Jensen & Meckling (1976) as a contract under which one or more persons (the principal(s)) engage another person (the agent) to perform some service on their behalf which involves delegating some decision making authority to the agent. If both parties to the relationship are utility maximizes there is good reason to believe that the agent will not always act in the best interests of the principal. Agency cost Agency cost is the principal can limit divergences from his interest by establishing appropriate incentives for the agent and by incurring monitoring costs designed to limit the aberrant activities of the agent. In addition, in some situations it will pay the agent to expand resources to guarantee that he will not take certain actions which would harm the principal or to ensure that the principal will be compensated if he does take such actions. However, it is generally impossible for the principal or the agent at zero cost to ensure that the principal will be make optimal decisions from the principal’s viewpoint. In most agency relationships, the principal and agent will incur positive monitoring...
Words: 1211 - Pages: 5
...of two groups of people; principals or superiors and agents or subordinates. The principals will delegate decision making authority to the agents and expect them to perform certain functions in return for a reward. Both the principals and the agents are assumed to be rational economic persons motivated solely by self-interest but may differ with respect to preferences, beliefs and information (Jensen and Meckling, 1976). The principal/agent relationship can exist throughout any organisation and usually starts from the shareholder-director and ends with the supervisor-shop floor worker (Figure 1.1). In an organisation context, which involves uncertainty and asymmetric information, the agent’s actions may not always be directed to the best interests of the principal. Agents’ pursuit of their self-interest instead of those of the principal is what is called the agency problem (Jensen and Meckling, 1976). To counter this behaviour, the principal may monitor the agents’ performance through an accounting information system. The owner can also limit such aberrant behaviour by incurring auditing, accounting and monitoring costs and by establishing, also at a cost, an appropriate incentive scheme (Jensen and Meckling, 1976). According to Jensen (1998), agency theory seeks to understand: (1) how to assign decision making responsibility to agents, (2) how to monitor agents’ behaviour, and (3) how to design incentives that cause agents to behave in a way that enhances the principal’s interests...
Words: 1400 - Pages: 6
...Chapter 1 • Problems 2 Explain several dimensions of the shareholder-principal conflict with manager-agent known as the principal-agent problem. To mitigate agency problems between senior executives and shareholders, should the compensation committee of the board devote more to executive salary and bonus (cash compensation) or more to long-term incentives? Why? What role does each type of pay play in motivating mangers? The dimensions of the principal agent problem are: Principals lack of knowledge, skill, time than agent. The objective for principal and agent is difficult to align. Normally agent is looking for present value, principal is looking for long term return. Compensations committee should design a salary or bonus formula that can satisfy agent’s expectation. For example, if any investment decrease the present value but increase the long term value that should be considered to manager’s contribution and be reward in a monetary way. Therefor, manager would not radically to seek present value. The salary plays a role of manager’s daily work. The bonus plays a role of manager’s operation performance. Bonus should motivate manager’s decision for long term and short term consideration. • Problems 3 Corporate profitability declined by 20% from 2008 to 2009. What performance percentage would you use to trigger executive bonuses for that year? Why? What issues would arise with hiring and retaining the best managers? If the corporate profitability...
Words: 780 - Pages: 4
...What is Agency Problems When a principal hires an agent to carry out specific tasks, the hiring is termed a "principal-agent relationship," or simply an "agency relationship." When a conflict of interest between the needs of the principal and those of the agent arises, the conflict is called an "agency problem." In financial markets, agency problems occur between the stockholders (principal) and corporate managers (agents). While the stockholders call on the managers to take care of the company, the managers may look to their own needs first. In finance, there are two primary agency relationships: * Managers and stockholders * Managers and creditors PROBLEMS BTW STOCKHOLDERS versus MANAGER and STOCKHOLDERS versus CREDITORS... 1. Stockholders versus Managers * If the manager owns less than 100% of the firm's common stock, a potential agency problem between mangers and stockholders exists. * Managers may make decisions that conflict with the best interests of the shareholders. For example, managers may grow their firms to escape a takeover attempt to increase their own job security. However, a takeover may be in the shareholders' best interest 2. Stockholders versus Creditors * Creditors decide to loan money to a corporation based on the riskiness of the company, its capital structure and its potential capital structure. All of these factors will affect the company's potential cash flow, which is a creditors' main concern. * Stockholders...
Words: 566 - Pages: 3
...highly liquid in nature as it deals with the already issued securities. In the secondary market, the value of a particular stock also varies from that of the face value. The resale value of the securities in the secondary market is dependent on the fluctuating interest rates. | Higher risk is associated with greater probability of higher return and lower risk with a greater probability of smaller return. This trade off which an investor faces between risk and return while considering investment decisions is called the risk return trade off. | Conflicts of interest and moral hazard issues that arise when a principal hires an agent to perform specific duties that are in the best interest of the principal but may be costly, or not in the best interests of the agent. The principal-agent problem develops when a principal creates an environment in which an agent has incentives to align its interests...
Words: 269 - Pages: 2
...Explain several dimensions of the shareholder-principal conflict with manager-agents known as the principal-agent problem. To mitigate agency problems between senior executives and shareholders, should the compensation committee of the board devote more to executive salary and bonus (cash compensation) or more to long-term incentives? Why? What role does each type of pay play in motivating managers? There are several dimensions to the principal-agent conflict. Principal-Agent Relationships exist whenever one person or party works in the interests of another party. The owner (the principal) hires and often delegates decision-making authority to professional managers (the agent) to perform tasks on his behalf. The challenge for the principal is to create an environment in which the agent has incentives to align their interests with those of the principal. The principal typically creates incentives for agents to act as the principal wants. The principal-agent conflict acerbates when the incentive system creates a conflict of interest, the principal cannot ensure the agent is performing exactly the way the principal would like and due to the intrinsic unobserved managerial effort and the presence of random disturbances in team production. The lack of information shared between the two makes it impossible and expensive for the principal to monitor the decisions and performance of the agent. The agent usually has less to lose than the principal; therefore they often seek acceptable...
Words: 526 - Pages: 3
...managers are the stockholders’ agents. The problem is to get between shareholders and managers since they have different objectives. Shareholders’ goals are maximizing firms’ value, managers’ goals are benefit themselves, thus the conflicts rise in the company. In this report through concept of agency costs and analysis that two questions will be discussed. First, to what extent that as a result of agency costs shareholders wealth will not be maximized by corporate management. I will talk the agency costs in the conflict of interest between shareholders and management through analysis and lots of examples. Second I will discuss the actions that shareholders take to reduce the agency costs, and achieve their wealth maximizing. According to Hickman (1996), there are always separation of ownership and management in large businesses. Major corporations may have a large number of shareholder, these shareholders have no way to be actively involved in management so that they hire professional managers to manage the corporations. Shareholders put their money in corporations because they hope that the value of their investment will grow, they want to increase their wealth as much as possible. So the relationship in corporations is that shareholders are owners or principals and management are agents. The managers’ job is to maximize shareholders’ wealth, but managers may think their own wealth rather than the shareholders’ wealth, this is the agency problem. For example managers...
Words: 1653 - Pages: 7
...Agency theory is based on the assumption that the individuals act to maximize their own expected utilities Relationship between one person (principal) entrusted to another person (the agent) RESIDUAL LOSS *Loss associated with no being able to fully align the intrst of principal with their agent BONDING COSTS *cost borne by the agent as a result of the aligning their interst EG: i)agent prepare the fs(effort & time) ii)Constraints manaher xtvt MONITORING COST *the cost observing & monitoring the agent’s behaviour EG: I )auditing cost ii)Budget restriction iii) Operating rules Agency Costs -due to self interst, the agent may act for their best interest. -Agency problem give rises the agency costs JENSEN & MECKLING (1976) *Contract under which on or more (principals) engage another person (the agent) to perform some service on the principal’s behalf which involves delegating some decision making authority to the agent *Utility maximization by both parties (eg: there is no reason to believe that the agent will always act in the principal’s best interest.) Agency problem -problem of inducing an agent to behave as if he were maximizing the principal’s welfare. Focus on delegation of jobs from principal to the agent AGENCY THEORY POSITIVE -Descriptive, explanatory or predictive -describe how people do behave -largely dismissive NORMATIVE -Prescriptive -prescribe how people (acctnt) should behave to achieve an outcome...
Words: 480 - Pages: 2
...Enron: Case Study 1 The purpose of this paper is to formally address the Enron scandal that came out in late 2001. It will discuss a brief introduction to how Enron came to be such a large and powerful corporation and the decisions made which resulted in its ultimate downfall. While discussing these time periods, accounting issues such as the agency and horizon problems as well as agency costs and the manner in which they affected Enron will be dissected additionally. Lastly, an analysis of these issues and recommendations given in favor of preventing types of corruption like this will be listed out in detail. The company all starts with Kenneth Lay. Lay received a PhD in economics and was interested well ahead of the industry, in energy deregulation. He was promoted by George Bush Sr. to be named as Deregulations Ambassador at Large (Gibney, 2005). In 1990, Jeff Skilling joined Enron and turned the pipeline company essentially into an “energy bank”. This helped immensely for Enron in terms of establishing themselves as a very powerful corporation. “Enron was quickly transformed from a sleepy cash cow to a darling of Wall Street with a bounty of promising opportunities.” (Stewart, 2006). Enron’s misuse of mark to market accounting became step one of a few crucial mistakes that the company had made. “With a wave of accountants’ magic wands, Enron was authorized to record in a single year all the profit that would normally be booked over 10 to 20-year...
Words: 1935 - Pages: 8
...or more other individuals, called agents, to perform some service and then delegate decision-making authority to the agents. The primary agency relationships in business are those (1) between stockholders and managers and (2) between debtholders and stockholders. These relationships are not necessarily harmonious; indeed, agency theory is concerned with so-called agency conflicts, or conflicts of interest between agents and principals. This has implications for, among other things, corporate governance and business ethics. When agency occurs it also tends to give rise to agency costs, which are expenses incurred in order to sustain an effective agency relationship (e.g., offering management performance bonuses to encourage managers to act in the shareholders' interests). Accordingly, agency theory has emerged as a dominant model in the financial economics literature, and is widely discussed in business ethics texts. Agency theory in a formal sense originated in the early 1970s, but the concepts behind it have a long and varied history. Among the influences are property-rights theories, organization economics, contract law, and political philosophy, including the works of Locke and Hobbes. Some noteworthy scholars involved in agency theory's formative period in the 1970s included Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz, Michael Jensen, William Meckling, and S.A. Ross. CONFLICTS BETWEEN MANAGERS AND SHAREHOLDERS Agency theory raises a fundamental problem in organizationself-interested behavior...
Words: 17274 - Pages: 70
...The Uses and Abuses of Agency Theory in Business Ethics The spectacular corporate scandals and bankruptcies of the past decade have served as a powerful reminder of the risks that are involved in the ownership of enterprise. Unlike other patrons of the firm, owners are residual claimants on its earnings.1 As a result, they have no explicit contract to protect their interests, but rely instead upon formal control of the decision-making apparatus of the firm in order to ensure that their interests are properly respected by managers. In a standard business corporation, it is the shareholders who stand in this relationship to the firm. Yet as the recent wave of corporate scandals has demonstrated once again, it can be extraordinarily difficult for shareholders to exercise effective control of management, or more generally, for the firm to achieve the appropriate alignment of interests between managers and owners. After all, it is shareholders who were the ones most hurt by the scandals at Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, Parmalat, Hollinger, and elsewhere. For every employee at Enron who lost a job, shareholders lost at least US$4 million.2 Furthermore, employees escaped with their human capital largely intact. Creditors and suppliers continue to pick over the bones of the corporation (which still exists, under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and continues to liquidate assets in order to pay off its debts).3 But as far as shareholders are concerned, their investments have simply evaporated...
Words: 15508 - Pages: 63
...on the listed above studies. The components of CEO compensation are classified into four categories: salary, bonus, long-term incentive rewards (e.g., stock options), and benefits. In examining these components, equity based compensation and agency theory were employed and investigated as key factors of analysis. Many academic scholars advocate that the issues of CEO compensation have been a subject of debate and research, due to the agency problem. Thus, for the past three decades, issue of executive compensation was approached from the perspective of the principal-agent relationship. Agency problem, in the context of the five papers mentioned above ‘is the possibility of conflicts of interest between the shareholders and managers of a firm’. According to agency theory, each firm consists of principals (shareholders) and agents (managers). The assumptions of agency theory are that agents are motivated by self-interest, are rational actors, and are risk-averse (Kathleen et al, 1989). Thus, an agency problem exists when an agent such as a CEO has established an agenda that odds with stockholder interests. However, the nature of the conflict between a CEO and shareholders may arise because the CEO’s objectives may not...
Words: 1942 - Pages: 8
...Business and Management; Vol. 10, No. 1; 2015 ISSN 1833-3850 E-ISSN 1833-8119 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education The Agency Problem: Measures for Its Overcoming Meri Boshkoska1 1 Faculty Economics-Prilep, Republic of Macedonia Correspondence: Meri Boshkoska, Faculty of Economics-Prilep, Republic of Macedonia. E-mail: meribb@yahoo.com Received: September 19, 2014 Accepted: November 4, 2014 Online Published: December 20, 2014 doi:10.5539/ijbm.v10n1p204 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ijbm.v10n1p204 Abstract As the corporative company type emerged, the two functions of ownership and management are separated. In the companies with a large number of employees the managers are the ones that manage the capital in the best interest of the shareholders. In this type of companies, conflict of interest may occur between the managers and the shareholders. Having more information about the work of the company, managers may use it in making decisions for their own benefit, which on the other hand cannot be as beneficial for the shareholders. Conflict of interest between managers and shareholders leads to so-called agency problem. There are different ways by which shareholders can control the operations of management. Some of the measures that can be used to resolve and prevent this problem are subject of analysis in this paper. Keywords: management, ownership, shareholders, conflict of interest, asymmetrical information, corporate governance ...
Words: 3875 - Pages: 16
...Chapter 1: Exercises 2, 3, and 6 2. Explain several dimensions of the shareholder-principal conflict with manager-agents known as the principal-agent problem. To mitigate agency problems between senior executives and shareholders, should the compensation committee of the board devote more to executive salary and bonus (cash compensation) or more to long-term incentives? Why? What role does each type of pay play in motivating managers? The dimensions of the principal agent problem are: Principals lack of knowledge, skill, and time than agent. The objective for principal and agent is difficult to align. Normally agent is looking for present value; principal is looking for long term return. Compensations committee should design a salary or bonus formula that can satisfy agent’s expectation. For example, if any investment decreases the present value but increase the long term value that should be considered to manager’s contribution and be reward in a monetary way. Therefore, manager would not radically to seek present value. The salary plays a role of manager’s daily work. The bonus plays a role of manager’s operation performance. Bonus should motivate manager’s decision for long term and short term consideration. 3. Corporate profitability declined by 20 percent from 2008 to 2009. What performance percentage would you use to trigger executive bonuses for that year? Why? What issues would arise with hiring and retaining the best managers? If the corporate profitability...
Words: 993 - Pages: 4
