Agency Theory and Participative Budgeting Experiments

A series of participative budgeting experiments has examined the effect of incentive structures and/or information environments on employees' reporting and production decisions. We analyze the previous experiments in terms of the insights they offer regarding agency theory. We expand the previous analyses of the incentive contracting experiments in three ways. First, we classify the earliest set of participative budgeting experiments based on the type of incentive and information structures examined in each study. Second, from the 21 papers we review, we identify eight specific cases for which the experimental evidence contradicts an agency theory prediction (i.e., anomalies). Third, we develop a classification scheme that can be used to organize hypotheses in terms of whether they rely on an agency theory prediction, a competing behavioral prediction, or a combination of the two. We use this classification to illustrate why we believe that studies that test both an agency theory prediction and a competing behavioral prediction are more likely to advance the development of theory than those that do not.