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We consider a highly-qualified individual with respect to her choice between two distinct career paths. She can choose between a mid-level management position in a large company and an executive position within a smaller listed company with the possibility to directly affect the company’s share price. She invests in the financial market includ- ing the share of the smaller listed company. The utility maximizing strategy from consumption, investment, and work effort is derived in closed form for logarithmic utility. The power utility case is discussed as well. Conditions for the individual to pursue her career with the smaller listed company are obtained. The participation constraint is formulated in terms of the salary differential between the two posi- tions. The smaller listed company can offer less salary. The salary shortfall is offset by the possibility to benefit from her work effort by acquiring own-company shares. This gives insight into aspects of optimal contract design. Our framework is applicable to the pharma- ceutical and financial industry, and the IT sector.
We develop a framework for analyzing an executive’s own-company stockholding and work effort preferences. The executive, characterized by risk aversion and work effectiveness parameters, invests his personal wealth without constraint in the financial market, including the stock of his own company whose value he can directly influence with work effort. The executive’s utility-maximizing personal investment and work effort strategy is derived in closed-form, and an indifference utility rationale is demonstrated to determine his required compensation. Our results have implications for the practical and theoretical assessment of executive quality and the benefits of performance contracting. Assuming knowledge of the company’s non-systematic risk, our executive’s unconstrained own-company investment identifies his work effectiveness (i.e. quality), and also reflects work effort that establishes a base-level that performance contracting should seek to exceed.
The scope of this paper is to enhance the model for the own-company stockholder (given in Desmettre, Gould and Szimayer (2010)), who can voluntarily performance-link his personal wealth to his management success by acquiring stocks in the own-company whose value he can directly influence via spending work effort. The executive is thereby characterized by a parameter of risk aversion and the two work effectiveness parameters inverse work productivity and disutility stress. We extend the model to a constant absolute risk aversion framework using an exponential utility/disutility set-up. A closed-form solution is given for the optimal work effort an executive will apply and we derive the optimal investment strategies of the executive. Furthermore, we determine an up-front fair cash compensation applying an indifference utility rationale. Our study shows to a large extent that the results previously obtained are robust under the choice of the utility/disutility set-up.