IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_354.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Controlling Investment Decisions: Hurdle Rates and Intertemporal Cost Allocation

Author

Listed:
  • Sunil Dutta
  • Stefan Reichelstein

Abstract

We examine alternative performance measures for a manager who has superior information about the profitability of an investment project and who contributes to periodic operating cash flows through his efforts. We find that residual income based on a suitably chosen depreciation schedule is an optimal performance measure. To address the underlying asymmetric information problem, the capital charge rate in the calculation of residual income should be equal to the firm's hurdle rate, which is the critical internal rate of return below which the principal would not want to fund the project. This hurdle rate includes the compensation cost for the better informed manager and therefore exceeds the principal's cost of capital. We also show that residual income remains an optimal performance measure in settings where multiple divisions compete for scarce investment funds. In order to solve the resource allocation problem, the capital charge rate must then be increased to a competitive hurdle rate.

Suggested Citation

  • Sunil Dutta & Stefan Reichelstein, 2000. "Controlling Investment Decisions: Hurdle Rates and Intertemporal Cost Allocation," CESifo Working Paper Series 354, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_354
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo_wp354.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fudenberg, Drew & Holmstrom, Bengt & Milgrom, Paul, 1990. "Short-term contracts and long-term agency relationships," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 51(1), pages 1-31, June.
    2. Biddle, Gary C. & Bowen, Robert M. & Wallace, James S., 1997. "Does EVA(R) beat earnings? Evidence on associations with stock returns and firm values," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(3), pages 301-336, December.
    3. Rogerson, William P, 1997. "Intertemporal Cost Allocation and Managerial Investment Incentives: A Theory Explaining the Use of Economic Value Added as a Performance Measure," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(4), pages 770-795, August.
    4. Meyer, Margaret A & Vickers, John, 1997. "Performance Comparisons and Dynamic Incentives," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(3), pages 547-581, June.
    5. Harris, Milton & Raviv, Artur, 1998. "Capital budgeting and delegation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(3), pages 259-289, December.
    6. Richard A. Lambert, 1986. "Executive Effort and Selection of Risky Projects," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 17(1), pages 77-88, Spring.
    7. Holmstrom, Bengt & Milgrom, Paul, 1991. "Multitask Principal-Agent Analyses: Incentive Contracts, Asset Ownership, and Job Design," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 7(0), pages 24-52, Special I.
    8. Rick Antle & Gary D. Eppen, 1985. "Capital Rationing and Organizational Slack in Capital Budgeting," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 31(2), pages 163-174, February.
    9. Al Ehrbar & G. Bennett Stewart, 1999. "The Eva Revolution," Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Morgan Stanley, vol. 12(2), pages 18-31, June.
    10. M. Harris & C. H. Kriebel & A. Raviv, 1982. "Asymmetric Information, Incentives and Intrafirm Resource Allocation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 28(6), pages 604-620, June.
    11. Roger B. Myerson, 1981. "Optimal Auction Design," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 6(1), pages 58-73, February.
    12. Harris, Milton & Raviv, Artur, 1996. "The Capital Budgeting Process: Incentives and Information," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 51(4), pages 1139-1174, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alan V. S. Douglas, 2003. "Corporate Investment Incentives and Accounting†Based Debt Covenants," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 20(4), pages 645-683, December.
    2. Lambert, Richard A., 2001. "Contracting theory and accounting," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(1-3), pages 3-87, December.
    3. Stefan Dierkes, 2004. "Strategische Kostenanpassung oder relative Leistungsbewertung — Was ist besser?," Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research, Springer, vol. 56(1), pages 45-59, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Reichelstein, Stefan J. & Dutta, Sunil, 2001. "Controlling Investment Decisions: Depreciation and Capital Charges," Research Papers 1722, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    2. Sandro Brusco & Fausto Panunzi, 2020. "Internal financing, managerial compensation and multiple tasks," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 16(4), pages 501-527, December.
    3. Laux, Volker, 2008. "On the value of influence activities for capital budgeting," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 65(3-4), pages 625-635, March.
    4. Kim, Doyoung, 2006. "Capital budgeting for new projects: On the role of auditing in information acquisition," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 257-270, September.
    5. Stoughton, Neal M. & Zechner, Josef, 2007. "Optimal capital allocation using RAROC(TM) and EVA(R)," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 16(3), pages 312-342, July.
    6. Wagner, Alexander F. & Miller, Nolan H. & Zeckhauser, Richard J., 2006. "Screening budgets," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 61(3), pages 351-374, November.
    7. Hoang, Daniel & Gatzer, Sebastian & Ruckes, Martin E., 2018. "The economics of capital allocation in firms: Evidence from internal capital markets," Working Paper Series in Economics 115, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Department of Economics and Management.
    8. Harris, Milton & Raviv, Artur, 1998. "Capital budgeting and delegation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(3), pages 259-289, December.
    9. Dutta, Sunil & Fan, Qintao, 2012. "Incentives for innovation and centralized versus delegated capital budgeting," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(3), pages 592-611.
    10. Schmidbauer, Eric, 2019. "Budget selection when agents compete," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 158(C), pages 255-268.
    11. Madhav V. Rajan & Stefan Reichelstein, 2004. "ANNIVERSARY ARTICLE: A Perspective on ÜAsymmetric Information, Incentives and Intrafirm Resource AllocationÝ," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 50(12), pages 1615-1623, December.
    12. Roper, Andrew H. & Ruckes, Martin E., 2012. "Intertemporal capital budgeting," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(9), pages 2543-2551.
    13. Xu, Su Xiu, 2021. "Overexploitation Risk in “Green Mountains and Clear Water”," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 179(C).
    14. Sunil Dutta, 2008. "Managerial Expertise, Private Information, and Pay-Performance Sensitivity," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 54(3), pages 429-442, March.
    15. Raul O. Chao & Stylianos Kavadias & Cheryl Gaimon, 2009. "Revenue Driven Resource Allocation: Funding Authority, Incentives, and New Product Development Portfolio Management," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 55(9), pages 1556-1569, September.
    16. Bernardo, Antonio E. & Cai, Hongbin & Luo, Jiang, 2001. "Capital budgeting and compensation with asymmetric information and moral hazard," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(3), pages 311-344, September.
    17. Nolan Miller & Alexander Wagner & Richard Zeckhauser, 2013. "Solomonic separation: Risk decisions as productivity indicators," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 46(3), pages 265-297, June.
    18. Szu-Wen Chou, 2002. "Flattened Resource Allocation, Hierarch Design and the Boundaries of the Firm," Levine's Working Paper Archive 618897000000000056, David K. Levine.
    19. Szydlowski, Martin, 2019. "Incentives, project choice, and dynamic multitasking," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 14(3), July.
    20. Bernardo, Antonio E. & Luo, Jiang & Wang, James J.D., 2006. "A theory of socialistic internal capital markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(3), pages 485-509, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_354. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.