Potential, Prizes and Performance: Testing Tournament Theory with Professional Tennis Data This paper tests two hypotheses from the theory of elimination tournaments: (i) that uneven tournaments, where the contestants are ex ante heterogeneous, entail lower effort exertion; this is a prediction from agency theory that has not been tested empirically before; and (ii) whether incentives set throu...

Earnings management is found to be driven by different managerial incentives. Previous studies have identified that executive compensation contracts create incentives for earnings management. The agency theory and the positive accounting theory provide explanations for contract-driven earnings management. This study links the agency theory and the positive accounting theory and reviews the earl...

Agency theory suggests that the interests of opportunistic, self-interested agents conflict with those of principals. Stewardship theory suggests instead that executives’ interests are aligned with company interests and that executives are thus more intrinsically motivated than agency theory implies. This study develops hypotheses regarding the psychological and situational factors that affect ...