Investitionsbudgetierung und implizite Verträge: Wie resistent ist der Groves-Mechanismus bei dynamischer Interaktion?

Summary

Applied agency theory in accounting has always been particularly interested in mechanisms which induce truthful reporting in divisionally organized corporations. Consequently, advantages and disadvantages of the so called Grovesscheme have been thoroughly scrutinized in the literature. Although the mechanism seems to provide truthful reporting under specified conditions, it may be vulnerable to exploitation by colluding agents. Despite this Budde/Göx/Luhmer (1998) recently showed in a one period model that collusion among rational agents is not a dominant strategy: Since the agents cannot enforce a binding contract in court, they fail to commit credibly upon their reporting strategy. The starting point of this paper is to test whether this result still holds in a dynamic setting where agents interact over multiple periods. In two different models, one of imperfect information about the timing of the budgeting game and one model of imperfect information about the agents' type, we show that rational agents almost spontaneously engage in self-enforcing contracts and thus easily succeed in extracting collusive rents. Hence, the Groves-scheme fails to be collusion proof in a dynamic setting.