Stock option plans are used to increase managerial incentives, and business practices usually set the exercise price equal to the stock market price. The purpose of this paper is to underline the importance of a process of negotiation leading to a possible equilibrium contract satisfying both managers and shareholders. The two key variables of the model are the percentage of equity capital offered by the shareholders to the managers and the exercise price of the options that may be at a discount. We explicitly introduce risk aversion and information asymmetries in the form of (i) an economic uncertainty in the gain of cash flow, (ii) possibly biased information between the two parties and (iii) a noise in the valuation price of the stock in the market. The existence of a process of negotiation between shareholders and managers leading to a possible disclosure of private information is highlighted. As a conclusion, we show that "efficient" stock option plans should be granted in a context of trade-off between the percentage of capital awarded to managers and the discount in stock price.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.