Do Managerial Incentives Facilitate Anti-competitive Behavior? Evidence from Collusion

We investigate the relationship between management incentives and collusion. This is particularly important as the manager acts on behalf of the owner and determines the firm strategy. Compensation schemes, intended to overcome the principle-agent problem between shareholders and managers, generally determine their managerial actions. While this is beneficial by aligning managers' interests with those of the firm's shareholders, the means to achieve this goal could be detrimental from a social welfare perspective. Our empirical analysis is based on a combination of firm, manager, and cartel data to identify managers' remuneration schemes and cartels within the United States. We show that a higher degree of managers' long-term incentives indeed facilitates and stabilizes collusion. Further analyzing the remuneration schemes of various management positions, we find that the impact is particularly pronounced for non-CEOs and CFOs. Additional results imply that firms run by managers with a higher share of equity compensation or more equity-based risk-taking incentives are more likely to behave anti-competitive.