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http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.p20151073
Since at least Holmstrom (1979), agency the- agency models entirely by suggesting roles for
orists and managerial accountants have analyzed formal measures in other models of informal
what kinds of performance measures should be management.
used in formal incentive contracts.1 For exam- Section II is both more novel and more
ple, when Kaplan and Norton (1992, 1993, speculative. Our focus shifts from using formal
1996, 2001) proposed that company perfor- measures in informal management to devel-
mance be measured with a balanced scorecard oping informal management in the first place.
of both financial and non-financial measures, Imposing ostensibly perfect measures on an
accounting scholars envisioned its role only in organization from outside can work less well
formulaic compensation contracts.2 than having key stakeholders participate in
We describe an alternative view of the score- developing their own, potentially inferior, per-
card, in which its formal measures are created formance measures. In this sense, it is not the
for and used in informal management. By use of a balanced scorecard but rather its internal
informal we do not mean casual, haphazard, creation that can change an organizations cul-
or capricious behavior, but instead managerial ture (defined below).
behavior not fully determined by rules or for-
mulaswhere executives use discretion and I. Using Formal Measures in Formal and
judgment rather than managing solely by the Informal Management
numbers. Examples of informal management
include adaptation, coordination, politics and Most models of performance measurement
influence, leadership, and informal authority. concern agency problems.3 In actual practice of
Section I of this essay extends the use of for- course, managers use performance measures in
mal measures from formal to informal manage- many ways beyond compensation. We therefore
ment. We review the role of formal measures begin with agency but then shift to other uses for
in formal agency contracts and then discuss performance measures.
relational incentive contracts that use infor-
mal weights on formal performance measures. A. Formal Measures in Agency Problems4
More importantly, however, we depart from
Consider the following example of a for-
mal measure in formal management.5 An
*Gibbons: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 100
Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142 (e-mail: rgibbons@ agents total contribution to firm value is
mit.edu); Kaplan: HBS, Soldiers Field, Boston, MA y=f1a1+f2a2+, whereas the agents mea-
02163 (e-mail: rkaplan@hbs.edu). We are grateful to Eliza sured performance is p=g1a1+g2a2+.
Forsythe and Stephanie Hurder for research assistance, to
the MIT Sloan Schools Program on Innovation in Markets
and Organizations for financial support, and to Nancy 3
Again, see Demski (2008) for a review.
Beaulieu, Heikki Rantakari, and Tommy Wang for a decade 4
Space constraints dictate that the descriptions of models
of instruction on these and related issues. be terse and their analyses non-existent. On agency models
Go to http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.p20151073 to visit like those described here, see Gibbons (2010, Section 2)
the article page for additional materials and author disclo- for an introduction and Gibbons and Roberts (2013) for a
sure statement(s). survey.
1
See Demski (2008) for a review. 5
This basic model was developed by Feltham and Xie
2
For example, see Ittner, Larcker, and Rajan (1997) or (1994) and is in the spirit of Holmstrom and Milgrom
Lambert (2001). (1991) and Baker (1992).
447
448 AEA PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS MAY 2015
The agents total contribution to firm value, y, prefer informal weights on formal measures, to
is too nuanced to be verifiable by an auditor the exclusion of any role for y.
or adjudicated by a court. The agents mea- Finally, in multi-lateral relational contracting
sured performance, p, however, is verifiable so (such as between a principal and two agents), if
that compensation contracts can take the form agent is output yi is not observable to agent j,
w=s+bp. If both parties are risk-neutral, the parties might again prefer informal weights
with payoffs =yw to the principal and on formal measures, such as (i)pi, if i and
U=wc(a1,a2) to the agent, the optimal piare commonly observed by all three parties.7
f
bonus rate is b*=___
cos(), where is the
g B. Beyond Agency
angle between the coefficient vectors f and g.
Even in formal management, we can model Organizations also use performance mea-
how a balanced scorecard might be superior sures in many important roles beyond incentive
to purely financial measures. For example, contracting. Case studies of such uses include
the principal can pay k to change from p to a the interactive budgeting system at Johnson
new measure q that has a smaller . Another and Johnson (Simons 2000), benchmarking of
approach (which surfaces the idea that a score- clinical outcomes at a surgical practice (Porter,
card contains multiple measures) is to imagine Deerberg-Wittram, and Marks 2014), aligning
that paying k makes not only p but also q avail- branded gasoline stations to a common value
able, so that both measures can be used in the proposition (Kaplan 1996), and communicat-
agents compensation formula. ing customer-service goals to bank employees
As a first example of informal management (Campbell and Kazan 2014).
(but still within an agency setting), we turn from These and other uses of performance mea-
formal to relational incentive contracts.6 In a sures (and information systems more generally)
repeated version of the setting above, the parties relate to the growing literature on informa-
may be able to utilize y, even though it is not tion and decisions in organizations.8 Gibbons,
an auditable performance measure. Consider the Matouschek, and Roberts (2013)henceforth,
relational incentive contract w=s+B(y). The GMRprovide the following simple framework
first-best bonus function would be B(y)=y, but that nests many models from this literature:
this bonus will not be feasible if the parties are
too impatient, so the second-best equilibrium in (i) The state of the world s S is drawn
the repeated game will entail B(y)<y. from the distribution f(s).
This model of relational incentive contracts
describes informal measures used in informal (ii) Player 1 privately observes the signal
management. Formal measures could be added drawn from the distribution g(|s).
in several ways. Most simply, one could com-
bine the two models above: w=s+bp+B(y). (iii) Player 1 chooses an influence action
More realistically, there could be a vector p of a A.
performance measures (as in a scorecard),not
just a single measure p. (iv) Player 2 privately observes the signal
Continuing in this vein, consider drawn from the distribution h(|s,a).
informal weights on formal measures:
w=s+bp+B(y)+()p, where is a sig- (v) Player 2 chooses a decision d D.
nal that each party commonly observes but an
auditor or court cannot. In fact, if y were sub- (vi) The players receive payoffs Ui(s,a,d)
jective (i.e., observed by only the principal) for i=1, 2.
then needing to induce the principal to reveal y
would create inefficiencies, so the parties might
mented, and builds understanding about how Demski, Joel S. 2008. Managerial Uses of
executive performance will be evaluated. In the Accounting Information. 2nd ed. New York:
spirit of Gibbons and Henderson (2013), these Springer.
outcomes of developing a scorecard internally Dessein, Wouter, and Tano Santos. 2006. Adap-
are examples of management practices that rely tive Organizations. Journal of Political Econ-
on relational contracts among the members of omy 114 (5): 95695.
the executive team. As Gibbons and Henderson Feltham, Gerald A., and Jim Xie. 1994. Per-
argue, such relational contracts require both formance Measure Congruity and Diversity
task knowledge (of what is supposed to be in Multi-Task Principal/Agent Relations.
done) and relational knowledge (of how man- Accounting Review 69 (3): 42953.
agers should react after unanticipated events Fuchs, William. 2007. Contracting with Repeated
occur). Moral Hazard and Private Evaluations. Amer-
Viewed through the lens of relational con- ican Economic Review 97 (4): 143248.
tracting, developing a scorecard of formal Gibbons, Robert. 2010. Inside Organizations:
measures internally creates not only the for- Pricing, Politics, and Path Dependence.
mal measures themselves but also agreement Annual Review of Economics 2 (1): 33765.
among the participants about how the measures Gibbons, Robert, and Rebecca Henderson. 2013.
will be used in informal management. In this What Do Managers Do? In The Handbook
sense, the internal development of the scorecard of Organizational Economics, edited by R.
helps to create a new corporate culture aligned Gibbons and J. Roberts, 680731. Princeton:
to the strategy, where we define culture as Princeton University Press.
described by Schein (2010)shared assump- Gibbons, Robert, Niko Matouschek, and John
tions about: mission, strategy, and goals; the Roberts. 2013. Decisions in Organizations.
means to achieve the goals; the measurement of In The Handbook of Organizational Econom-
results; and how to react when things do not go ics, edited by R. Gibbons and J. Roberts, 373
according to plan. We eagerly await new models 431. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
of how the development and use of performance Gibbons, Robert, and John Roberts. 2013. Eco-
measures can play these complex roles in infor- nomic Theories of Incentives in Organiza-
mal management. tions. In The Handbook of Organizational
Economics, edited by R. Gibbons and J. Rob-
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VOL. 105 NO. 5 FORMAL MEASURES IN INFORMAL MANAGEMENT 451
1. Volker Stein, Arnd Wiedemann. 2016. Risk governance: conceptualization, tasks, and research agenda.
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