Maria Grazia Romano

Contracts with Wishful Thinkers

Managers with anticipatory emotions have higher current utility if they are optimistic about the future. We study an employment contract between an (endogenously) optimistic manager and realistic investors. The manager faces a trade-off between ensuring that the chosen levels of effort reflect accurate news and savoring emotionally beneficial good news. We show that optimism may exacerbate incentive problems. Specifically, investors and manager agree over the optimal news recall when the managers weight on anticipatory utility is low. For intermediate values, there is a conflict of interest and investors bear an extra-cost to have the manager recalling bad news. For high weights on anticipatory utility, investors become indifferent between inducing signal recollection or not, and a pooling equilibrium obtains, reminiscent of adverse selection models. We then extend the analysis to the case in which the parameter capturing anticipatory utility is the managers private information. Last, we derive interesting testable predictions on the relationship between personality traits, managerial compensation and hiring policies.In a setting with a wishful thinking agent and a realistic principal, the paper studies how incentive contracts should be designed to control for both moral hazard and self-deception. The properties of the contract that reconciles the agent with reality depend on the weight the agent attaches to anticipatory utility. When this is small, principal and agent agree on full recollection. For intermediate values the principal bears an extra cost to make the agent recall bad news. For large weights the principal renounces inducing signal recollection. We extend the analysis to the case in which the parameter of anticipatory utility is private information. The distinction between the two settings assumes practical relevance if preferences can be related to personality characteristics as in this case the parameter of anticipatory utility could be learned through psychological testing.

Asymmetry in the permanent price impact of block purchases and sales : theory and empirical evidence

This paper extends previous research which has examined the market impact of large transactions in bull and bear markets by examining the information effects of trades. Previous research has demonstrated that the information effects of buy trades are greater than the information effects of sell trades. We develop a theoretical model which predicts that this difference is greater in bear markets than bull markets, consistent with the (almost counter-intuitive) proposition that buy trades are relatively more informed in bear markets. Using a sample of trades executed on the NYSE in bull and bear market periods, we find evidence consistent with our primary theoretical model

Transaction fees and trading strategies in financial markets

The article examines the impact of transaction costs on the trading strategy of informed institutional investors in a sequential trading market where traders can choose to transact a large or a small amount of stock. The analysis shows how the trading strategy of informed investors and the price impact of their trades depends on market conditions. The main prediction of the model is that institutional buyers are, on average, more aggressive than institutional sellers in bearish markets and less aggressive in bullish markets. Hence, the price impact is higher for purchases when market conditions are bearish, while it is higher for sales when market conditions are bullish. However, this asymmetry vanishes during strongly bearish or bullish phases, when information-based orders stop because the informational advantage of institutional investors becomes too small with respect to the transaction costs.