Eric Van den Steen

Rational Overoptimism (and Other Biases)

Rational agents with differing priors tend to be overoptimistic about their chances of success. In particular, an agent who tries to choose the action that is most likely to succeed, is more likely to choose an action of which he overestimated, rather than underestimated, the likelihood of success. After studying the comparative statics of this mechanism, I show that it also causes agents to attribute failure to exogenous factors but success to their own choice of action, to disproportionately believe that they will outperform others, to overestimate the precision of their estimates, and to overestimate their control over the outcome.

Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm

In a system for simulcasting digitally modulated and analog FM signals over the same FM frequency band, the effect of the analog FM signal on the digitally modulated signal in the simulcast is calculated and canceled from the latter signal before its transmission. As a result, the digital transmission is free from interference from the analog FM signal. Moreover, the digital transmission is designed in such a manner that the interference caused thereby to the analog FM signal is kept at a minimal level.

Culture Clash: The Costs and Benefits of Homogeneity

This paper develops an economic theory of the costs and benefits of corporate culture---in the sense of shared beliefs and values---in order to study the effects of “culture clash” in mergers and acquisitions. I first use a simple analytical framework to show that shared beliefs lead to more delegation, less monitoring, higher utility (or satisfaction), higher execution effort (or motivation), faster coordination, less influence activities, and more communication, but also to less experimentation and less information collection. When two firms that are each internally homogeneous but different from each other merge, the above results translate to specific predictions about how the change in homogeneity will affect firm behavior. This papers predictions can also serve more in general as a test for the theory of culture as shared beliefs.

Disagreement and the Allocation of Control

I study how to allocate control (over one or multiple projects) when people may openly disagree on the optimal course of action. I first show that, in the efficient allocation, complementary decisions should be decided by the same person, while substitute decisions should be decided by different people. Furthermore, people who are confident about the right course of action and have a large stake in the outcome should get more control, while no decision should be left to chance. The model then derives an intuitive self-reinforcing mechanism for the co-location of income and control: as a person gets more control rights, she values (by revealed preference) income rights higher, so that it is optimal to give her more income rights; as a person gets more income rights, she values control rights higher, making it optimal to give her more control rights. Different projects, however, should often be allocated to different people. While appealing, I show that these intuitions do not hold in an analogous model with private benefits but common priors. First, all players then value residual income identically. Second, an increase in a players share of residual income may make him value control less, since the decisions necessary to maximize residual income may conflict with his private benefits. I also study a competitive allocation of control and show that while the efficient and competitive allocation coincide in the differing priors model, they often do not in the analogous private benefits model. I finally suggest how the framework can be used to explore the role of veto-rights or majority voting.

Overconfidence by Bayesian-Rational Agents

This paper derives two mechanisms through which Bayesian-rational individuals with differing priors will tend to be relatively overconfident about their estimates and predictions, in the sense of overestimating the precision of these estimates. The intuition behind one mechanism is slightly ironic: in trying to update optimally, Bayesian agents overweight information of which they over-estimate the precision and underweight in the opposite case. This causes overall an over-estimation of the precision of the final estimate, which tends to increase as agents get more data.

Shareholder Interests, Human Capital Investment and Corporate Governance

Корпорации одновременно утверждают, что человеческий капитал все более важен для их успеха, и что они стремятся максимизировать биржевую стоимость акций. В этой статье исследуется связь между этими двумя обстоятельствами. Мы показываем, что преследование интересов акционеров может потребовать передачи некоторой роли в управлении корпорации трудовому коллективу с целью мотивировать их на инвестирование в специфичный для фирмы человеческий капитал. Такие действия становятся более привлекательными, поскольку важность этих инвестиций возрастает. Этот результат также имеет отношение к спорам о реформировании европейской и японской систем управления в направлении американской системы, где влияние трудового коллектива ниже. В этом контексте мы предлагаем модель оптимального выбора системы управления в духе идей, которые предложил Холмстром.

Human Capital and Corporate Governance

Governance in the firm is a mechanism to help empowered claimants protect their interests, principally by giving them “voice” in corporate decisions. Germany and some other European countries have explicitly mandated a formal role for employees in corporate governance, whereas the “Anglo-Saxon” systems of the United States and United Kingdom have basically restricted governance to representatives of the providers of financial capital. The recent relative success of the American economy — transforming itself in the 1980s and achieving low unemployment and sustained growth since then — has raised the question whether shareholder value should also become the over-riding objective of European (and Japanese) business.

A Formal Theory of Strategy

What makes a decision strategic? When is strategy most important? This paper studies the structure and value of strategy (in its everyday sense), starting from a (functional) definition of strategy as ‘the smallest set of (core) choices to optimally guide the other choices.’ This definition captures the idea of strategy as the core of a – potentially flexible and adaptive – intended course of action. It coincides with the equilibrium outcome of a ‘strategy formulation game’ where a person can – at a cost – look ahead, investigate, and announce a small set of choices to the rest of the organization. Starting from that definition, the paper studies what makes a decision ‘strategic’ and what makes strategy important, considering commitment, irreversibility, and persistence of a choice; the presence of uncertainty (and the type of uncertainty); the number and strength of interactions and the centrality of a choice; its level and importance; the need for specific capabilities; and competition and dynamics. It shows, for example, that irreversibility does not make a decision more strategic but makes strategy more valuable, that long-range strategies will be more concise, why a choice what not to do can be very strategic, and that a strategy ‘bet’ can be valuable. It shows how strategy creates endogenously a hierarchy among decisions. And it also shows how understanding the structure of strategy may enable a strategist to develop the optimal strategy in a very parsimonious way.

Equity Participations, Hold-up, and Firm Boundaries

Equity participations affect the hold-up problem in two ways. On the one hand, they allow to reduce the externality that is created ex-post by hold-up. On the other hand, they change the bargaining positions by partially internalizing the threat of walking away from the bargaining. It turns out that, for firms that are run by professional managers and that bear the costs of the relevant investments, the bargaining effect is the more important. In some cases, it even allows to achieve complete efficiency. In particular, with one-sided dependency, a 50% participation gives full efficiency. In the case of bilateral dependency, the unique efficient solution is equivalent to a merger. This basis for determining optimal firm boundaries is essentially one of incentive design, as suggested by Holmstrom (1999), rather than property rights. The theory also shows how joint ventures can sometimes realize the benefits of equity participations, while avoiding some concurrent problems.

Strategy and the Strategist: How it Matters Who Develops the Strategy

This paper addresses primarily two questions. First, when or why should a company’s strategy be developed by its CEO versus by some outside analyst or other insider? Second, how does strategy, properly defined, interact with vision (in the sense of a strong belief) about various decisions? In the process, the paper also identifies three new criteria that make a decision strategic and derives two new explanations why strategies often reflect the background of the strategist. The paper studies these questions using a (new) functional definition of strategy as ‘the smallest set of choices to optimally guide the other choices.’ With regard to the first question – when or why should a company’s strategy be developed by its CEO – the paper shows that strategy formulation by the CEO (or by a strategist with control over the right decisions) leads to both a better strategy and better execution when the strategic decision is controversial. With regard to the second question, the paper shows that a strategist’s vision (as a strong belief) may improve implementation, but only if two conditions are met: the strong belief must be about a strategic decision and that decision must be controlled by the strategist. Vision about non-strategic decisions may in fact hurt the strategy’s implementation.