The impact of cultural and social values on executive compensation

本研究的目的是调查文化和社会价值观如何影响高管薪酬。许多关于高管薪酬的文献调查都认为，传统的方法，例如那些基于标准委托代理理论的方法，不能解释很大一部分高管薪酬的变化。虽然一些研究人员早在二十多年前就建议纳入背景信息，但几乎没有关于文化和社会价值观对薪酬合同设计的影响的研究。这项赠款提案主张使用新的数据来源，通过三条线的分析，将薪酬数据与文化和社会价值数据相匹配。第一条线是理论分析，开发了包括文化和社会价值在内的高管薪酬的数学模型。这一概念上的步骤超越了只考虑金钱动机、忽视更广泛社会背景的传统模式。第二种分析基于这样的假设，即所有影响薪酬设定的相关因素都受到这些价值观的影响，从而考察了文化和社会价值观对高管薪酬合同设计的影响。第三种分析假设，高层管理人员也重视他们的社会地位，并关心他们的社会认可度。因此，他们愿意在从社会地位获得的利益与纯粹的金钱补偿之间进行权衡。

The objective of this research is to investigate how cultural and social values affect executive compensation. Many surveys of the vast literature on executive compensation agree that conventional approaches, for example those on standard principal-agent theory, cannot explain a large part of the variation in executive compensation. While some researchers suggested to include contextual information more than two decades ago, little research has been forthcoming that addresses the impact of cultural and social values on the design of compensation contracts. This grant proposal advocates to use new data sources to match compensation data with data on cultural and social values by pursuing three lines of analysis. The first line of analysis is theoretical and develops mathematical models of executive compensation that include cultural and social values. This conceptual step goes beyond conventional models that allow only for monetary motivation and neglect the wider social context. The second line of analysis investigates the impact of cultural and social values on the design of executive compensation contracts based on the assumption that all relevant factors that influence pay-setting are affected by these values. The third line of analysis hypothesizes that top executives also value their social status and are concerned about their social recognition. Therefore, they are willing to trade-off benefits they obtain from social status against purely monetary compensation.