摘要:然而,很少有着重在文学上的理解上赢得事后的比赛。However, there has been little emphasis in the literature on understanding the effects of winning the tournament on ex post performance.
position generates incentives for employees to exert effort. A large literature in eco-
nomics, building on Lazear and Rosen (1981), analyzes the ex-ante incentives induced
by compensation schemes that reward individuals based on their ordinal ranking within
the organization. However, little attention has been paid to the ex-post behavior of
tournament winners. Does their behavior and performance change in ways that destroy
value for the principal? And if so, do they merely reduce their effort, reflecting the
reduced incentives, or does the behavior of tournament winners change along other di-
mensions? Finally, is the difference between ex-ante and ex-post behavior the inevitable
side product of an optimal incentive contract, or is it more prevalent in firms with poor
corporate governance, suggesting that it is at least partly avoidable?
Such questions about the ex-post behavior of tournament winners are particularly press-
ing if the difference in status or compensation between tournament winners and losers
is very large, i.e. the case of “superstars” in the sense of Rosen (1981). In this paper,
we study chief executive officers (CEOs) of U.S. corporations who achieve “superstar”
status via high-profile awards from the business press or other prominent organizations.
Business Week magazine, for example, annually names a list of “Best Managers” in
1
Quote taken from Lowe (1997).
1U.S. companies (25 per year since 1996). We compile a data set of CEO awards from
ten different sources, covering more than 25 years. We show that these award-winning
CEOs subsequently extract considerably higher compensation from their companies in
the short run. However, their companies subsequently underperform, both in terms of
stock returns and accounting profits over the one to three years following the award.
The underperformance is significant both relative to the overall market and relative to
a matched sample of (ex ante) similar CEOs with virtually identical past performance.
Over longer horizons, we find that award-winning CEOs spend more time and effort on
activities outside their company, such as writing their memoirs and other books, and
sitting on outside boards. At the same time, they appear to increase their manipulation
of company earnings to maintain the illusion of good performance.
The belief that exceptional performers, or tournament winners, subsequently underper-
form is widely-held in the popular press. In sports, the well-known “Sports Illustrated
Jinx” applies to athletes who appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. In the
entertainment industry, the term “Sophomore Jinx” refers to successful new performers
who do not live up to the quality of their debuts. In academia, Paul Samuelson describes
(the vulgar view of) “Nobel Prize Disease” as follows:
After winners receive the award and adulation, they wither away into vainglo-
rious sterility. More than that, they become pontificating windbags, preach-
ing to the world on ethics and futurology, politics and philosophy. At circular
tables, where they sit they believe to be the head of the table.
2
Most relevant to our
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