This paper develops a model to explain the widely used investment mandates in the institutional asset management industry based on two insights: first, giving a manager more investment flexibility weakens the link between fund performance and his effort in the designated market, and thus increases agency cost. Second, the presence of outside assets with negatively skewed returns can further increase the agency cost if the manager is incentivized to pursue outside opportunities. These effects motivate narrow mandates and tight tracking error constraints to most fund managers except those with exceptional talents. Our model sheds light on capital immobility and market segmentation that are widely observed in financial markets, and highlights important effects of negatively skewed risk on institutional incentive structures.

We study whether priors that admit full surplus extraction (FSE) are generic, an issue that becomes a gauge to evaluate the validity of the current mechanism design paradigm. We consider the space of priors on the universal type space, and thereby relax the assumption of a fixed finite number of types made by Crémer and McLean (1988). We show that FSE priors are topologically generic, contrary to the result of Heifetz and Neeman (2006) that FSE is generically impossible, both geometrically and measure-theoretically. Instead of using the BDP approach or convex combinations of priors adopted in Heifetz and Neeman (2006), we prove our genericity results by showing a robustness property of Crémer–McLean mechanisms.