Investment Choice with Managerial Incentive Schemes

Abstract

In this paper, we show that firms might get an additional strategic benefit from using marginal-cost-reducing investments in conjunction with a managerial incentive scheme. While both these instruments allow firms to “aggressively” participate in product market competition, we show that they act as strategic substitutes or complements depending on whether they are chosen simultaneously or sequentially under complete information. Given that the use of such instruments is inseparably linked with a Prisoner’s Dilemma kind of situation, our analysis shows a way to mitigate such effects, through their simultaneous use. In case the instruments are chosen without commitment, an asymmetric equilibrium is shown to exist, yielding unequal payoffs.