Anticipating problems from incentive conflict

Article:  The Economics of Organizational Architecture, article that shows how decision rights, evaluation metrics, and compensation schemes lead to problems. 

Incentive conflict between McDonalds and its Franchisees

The incentive conflict between franchisees and franchisors is well known.  Franchisors want to protect their brands, and want franchisees to invest in building a better retail experience.  However, because franchisees earn only a fraction of the returns from these brand-building investments, they are reluctant to to make them.

The conflict between McDonalds and its franchisees has come out into the open (2018 WSJ, 2019 Fortune, Twitter feed from a franchisee):

But traffic has waned in recent quarters, leading franchisees to voice concerns that the money they were being asked to invest in their stores for initiatives like remodels, self-serve kiosks, fresh beef, delivery, and all-day breakfast were not paying off.

“McDonald’s can set the direction of the brand, but you need the franchisees to buy into it,” says Senatore. “Franchisee alignment is so important to these systems.”

One way to manage this incentive conflicts is with:

1. Contracts to reward actions that are easily observable and contractible; and 
2. Vertical restraints, like exclusive territories, for actions that are not.  

Vertical restraints that restrict intra-brand competition among franchisees (e.g., with exclusive territories) give franchisees a profit stream that they are more eager to protect, i.e., with brand-building investments and higher-quality service.

Note that franchisees on freeways don't have much repeat business, so they can make more money by free riding on the brand reputation (e.g., by shirking on service or quality).  This incentive conflict is so costly to manage that McDonalds finds it easier to own and run their restaurants on the freeway.

HT:  Kaitlyn W.

Paying People to Lie: The Truth about Corporate Budgeting

Michael Jensen's timeless classic is available here.  In it he describes how stock market analysts set earnings expectations for a company's stock.  Since the CEO is paid in stock options which will decline in value if earnings fall short of analysts' expectations, the CEO wants to ensure that each division makes enough money to meet analysts' expectations.  In consultation with division managers, she turns analysts' earnings expectations into performance metrics, with each division manager's bonus tied to meeting her division's share of company earnings. 

With these incentives, each division manager has an incentive to understate (or lie about) how much her division can earn.  As a results, the negotiated division budgets need not reflect what managers actually know.   Important decisions are then made based on based on budgets constructed from lies.

Fortunately, there is an easy fix:

 [by]...changing the way organizations pay people. In particular to stop this highly counterproductive behavior we must stop using budgets or targets in the compensation formulas and promotion systems for employees and managers. This means taking all kinks, discontinuities and non-linearities out of the pay-for-performance profile of each employee and manager. Such purely linear compensation formulas provide no incentives to lie, or to withhold and distort information, or to game the system.

With a linear compensation scheme, there is no incentive to understate how much a division will earn.  And with better information, better decisions are made:

I believe that solving the problems could easily result in large productivity and value increases - sometimes as much as 50 to 100% improvements in productivity.

Sales "bunching" and high-powered commission rates

Ian Larkin studies the use of "high powered" quarterly sales commissions, used by virtually every firm that sells software. A typical incentive compensation scheme (as a function of sales) is highly convex: a sales person earns 2% if she sells $100,000 worth of software; 5% if $500,000; 8% if $1,000,000, ..., up to 25% if $8,000,000.

Ian finds that these high-powered (convex) compensation schedules give sales people an incentive to "bunch" sales into the same quarter. Just as convex production costs can be reduced by "smoothing", i.e., holding inventories to buffer sales shocks, so too can convex commissions be increased by "bunching" sales into the same quarter, the opposite of "smoothing."

Using proprietary data from a large vendor he finds that 75% of sales are occur on the last day of the quarter; and 5% of sales occur on the first day of the quarter, as sales people give discounts to customers to accelerate or delay purchases. These discounts cost the firm about 7% of revenue, which is about the same amount that it pays out in sales commissions.

The 7% revenue loss suggests that there is a way to make both firm and its salespeople better off: adopt linear commission schemes to eliminate the incentive to "bunch," and split the 7% savings between the firm and its sales people in the form of higher commission rates.

When asked why they use these costly incentive compensation schemes, managers say only that they need them to retain their "superstar" sales people. But surely there is a better way to retain superstars, isn't there? As always, I would like to hear from readers on whether they think this would work.

What is the best way to increase demand for your service?

Get the government to make it illegal not to buy!  MarginalRevolution.com has a nice post about the "Optometry Racket:"

In every other country in which I’ve lived, ...you can simply walk into an optician’s store and ask an employee to give you an eye test, likely free of charge. If you already know your strength, you can just tell them what you want..—no doctor’s prescription necessary. ...

 The excuse for the law is that eye exams can discover other problems. ... [But] the requirement to get a medical exam from an optometrist who has spent a minimum of seven years in higher education ... creates unreasonable costs—and unjustifiable suffering….

Here is an issue that everyone but Optometrists would support:  put Americans in charge of their own vision care, and abolish mandatory eye exams!

Taxes & transfers redistribute income

IN the graph above, the share of income earned by the top 1% is plotted against time.  Based on pre-tax income, it looks as if the share has doubled.  But this does not take account of our progressive tax system and government transfer payments, like Medicaid, (bottom line).  The after-tax and after-transfer shares of the richest look pretty flat.  

HT:  Greg Mankiw

Which organizational forms can best adapt to change?

One of the themes in this blog is that it is not necessarily the strongest firms that survive, but the most adaptable.  Kodak once dominated the film industry but now it is bankrupt.  How did this happen?

Part of the fault lies with Kodak's centralized structure which was slow to react to the expiration of its patents, and the advent of digital photography.  Colby Chandler, former CEO of Kodak, admitted as much at the 1984 annual meeting:

Like many companies, we are not used to working in an environment where there is rapid technological transfer from laboratory to the marketplace. But we know that will be important in our future.

In 1984, in the hopes of encouraging innovation, Kodak decentralized decision making to 17 different business units with profit and loss responsibility.  However, the decentralized decision making was not accompanied by incentive pay.  Instead, small bonuses were doled out by officious bureaucrats, according to office politics. 

As a result, Kodak continued its slow decline, and in 1993 the board of directors fired its CEO for not holding its managers accountable for failure.  This year, Kodak entered bankruptcy.

The moral of the story seems clear to me:   decentralized decision making is better for adapting to technological change, but only if accompanied by strong incentive pay.  This may be the reason that much of certain types of innovation is done by small firms:  owner/operators have the strongest incentives to perform. 

Incentives matter: physicians perform fewer surgeries on smokers

The move towards fixed fees, and away from fee-for-service, has given physicians an incentive to get their patients as healthy as possible before surgery, so that there are fewer complications.  Under a fixed fee system, e.g., $20,000 for a joint replacement, the surgeon makes less money if there are complications.

“A year from now, I’ll probably be at a point where I would require all my patients to stop smoking,” Spector said. “Currently, I evaluate it on a case-by-case basis. Over time, we’re going to feel comfortable being a little more stringent with our patients about these modifiable risks.” 

Edwards said he finds many patients “don’t take it well at first” when he advises them to quit smoking or lose weight. But many of them thank him later.

Moral hazard in parachuting

What happens when you make parachuting safer? 




People take more risks!
HT: Benjamin W.

A novel way to screen using the felony box

A student told me how his company used the felony box (previous posts) to screen out bad applicants

Being a felon did not rule you out from being hired to work for my company.  Instead, we used the box to see if the job applicant was truthful about their felony past.  We did not hire those who (i) had a felony record and didn’t disclose it; or (ii) lied when filling out the explanation of the charges.  

However, we did hire those who disclosed truthfully (except for certain crimes), and found them to be good employees.