ABSTRACT Although it is well understood that product market competition acts as a disciplining mechanism that reduces inefficiencies, our understanding of the implications for firms’ incentive design choices is still limited. We use a comprehensive new measure of competition and examine its effect on four major choices: CEO equity portfolio incentives, annual bonus plan incentives, choice of performance measures, and difficulty of financial performance targets. We find that competition reduces firm profits and total CEO compensation, including equity grants, which then also weakens portfolio incentives. Firms respond by adjusting annual bonus plans to restore incentives. Specifically, we find that competition goes together with stronger bonus plan incentives, more challenging annual performance targets, and a greater emphasis on long-term performance measures. Finally, we show that competition increases performance relative to annual bonus targets, which we interpret as evidence that CEOs work harder but get paid less in highly competitive environments. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: M41; M52.

Abstract Many companies use color codes in their internal performance reports to highlight how current performance compares to performance in a previous period. We examine whether the use of color coding affects managers' decision‐making in a resource allocation task. We argue that managers' decision accuracy will be lower if they receive noisier feedback, but that this detrimental effect of noise can be mitigated through color coding. Using two experiments, we find evidence consistent with our theory. Managers who receive reports in which performance increases are color‐coded green and performance decreases are color‐coded red are less affected by noise than managers who receive feedback reports without color coding. Supplemental analyses suggest that color coding induces managers to process feedback in a more holistic manner, which reduces the adverse effect of noise on managers' learning processes. Our findings have several important implications for research and practice.

ABSTRACT A large stream of work on relative performance evaluation highlights the benefits of using information about peer performance in contracting. In contrast, the potential costs of discouraging cooperation among peers have received much less attention. The purpose of our study is to examine how the importance of cooperation affects the use of information about peer performance in target setting, also known as relative target setting. Specifically, we use data from an industrial services company where business unit managers need to share specialized equipment and staff with their peers to manage bottlenecks in their capacity. We construct several empirical proxies for the costs and benefits of information about peer performance and examine their effects on target setting. We find robust evidence that the sensitivity of target revisions to past peer performance is higher when peer group performance has greater capacity to filter out noise but lower when the importance of cooperation among peers is greater.