Agency Problems and Goal Conflicts

Non-conscious goal conflicts

Agency Conflicts Around the World∗

We use a dynamic model of of financing decisions to measure agency conflicts at the firm level for a large panel of 12,652 firms from 14 countries. Our estimates show that agency conflicts are large and vary significantly across firms and countries. Differences in agency conflicts are largely due to differences in firm-level governance, ownership concentration, and other firm characteristics. T...

Payout policy, agency conflicts, and corporate governance

We examine the effect of corporate governance on the use of dividends and repurchases, composition of payout, and inclusion of a pre-commitment feature in the payout policy. We find that dividend payout is decreasing in governance quality. Corporate governance has a mixed effect on repurchases: good external governance prompts managers to repurchase more and to use repurchases as the only form ...

Resolving Goal Conflicts via Negotiation1

In non-cooperative multi-agent planning, resolution of multiple conflicting goals is the result of finding compromise solutions. Previous research has dealt with such multi-agent problems where planning goals are well-specified, subgoals can be enumerated, and the utilities associated with subgoals known. Our research extends the domain of problems to include non-cooperative multi-agent interac...

When conflicts are good: nonconscious goal conflicts reduce confirmatory thinking.

In this article, we argue that nonconscious goal conflicts are accompanied by a mindset that has wide-ranging implications for reasoning and thinking in content areas that are not part of the conflict itself. Specifically, we propose that nonconscious goal conflicts induce a mode of processing information that increases the likelihood of approaching an issue from opposing perspectives. This hyp...