Managerial Entrenchment, Reputation Building and the Optimality of Short-Term Projects

In this paper, we demonstrate that informational asymmetries within a firm along with managerial labor market concerns can jointly result in investment myopia being equilibrium behavior. In contrast to earlier studies (like that of Shleifer and Vishny [1989]), we find that in the presence of both reputation and entrenchment incentives, managers invest in long-term projects for reputation building and short-term projects to entrench themselves. Further, we establish conditions under which delegating project selection is optimal, even though it requires that the owner tolerate short-term project selection. Finally, we present several empirical implications of our analysis.