Optimal compensation contracts for optimistic managers

Abstract

We study an employment contract between an (endogenously) optimistic manager and realistic investors. The manager faces a trade-off between ensuring that effort reflects accurate news and savoring emotionally beneficial good news. Investors and manager agree on optimal recollection when the weight the manager attaches to anticipatory utility is small. For intermediate values investors bear an extra-cost to make the manager recall bad news. For large weights investors renounce inducing signal recollection. We extend the analysis to the case in which anticipatory utility is the manager’s private information and derive testable predictions on the relationship between personality traits, managerial compensation and recruitment policies.