Against the Odds! The Tradeoff Between Risk and Incentives is Alive and Well

The risk-incentives tradeoff (RIT) is a fundamental result of principal-agent theory. Yet, empirical evidence has been elusive. This could be due to a lack of robustness of the theory outside of the standard expected utility framework (EUT) or to confounding factors in the empirical tests. First, we theoretically study the existence of RIT under alternative theories: Rank-Dependent Utility (RDU) and Mean-Variance-Skewness (MVS). We show that RIT is remarkably robust under RDU, but not under MVS. Second, we use a novel experimental design that eliminates confounding factors and find evidence for RIT even in the case of risk-seeking agents, which is a distinct prediction of RDU. Our results provide support for the risk-incentives tradeoff and suggest that it applies to a broad range of situations including cases in which agents are risk-seeking (e.g., executive compensation).