主题：R&D Project Management: From Project Selection to Time Incentives

主讲人：Erick (Zhaolin) Li，悉尼大学商学院副教授

时间：2020年1月8日（周三）上午10:00-11:00

地点：中央财经大学学院南路校区主教615

主讲人介绍：Erick (Zhaolin) Li博士，悉尼大学商学院副教授，主要研究方向包括供应链管理、运营管理与其他领域交叉问题，论文发表在Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production & Operations Management, European Journal of Operations Research等国际顶级管理学期刊。

摘要：

This presentation covers three topics in relation to R&D project management. First, we consider how to design appropriate project selection standard in a principal-agent model where the agent prefers to maximize the subsidiary profit but the headquarters prefers to maximize the consolidate profit. An important result is that certain threshold policy (such as imposing a threshold on the consolidated profit) can be even worse than the naïve policy that does not impose any threshold. Second, we consider how to design time-based incentives to reward the agent’s effort on reducing the project completion time. We find that the performance of the fixed-payment-fixed-time (FPFT) contract and the linear-bonus contract critically depends on whether the time reduction is additive or multiplicative. When the time reduction is multiplicative, FPFT contract is much better than the linear-bonus contract; when the time reduction is additive, the opposite happens. Third, we consider how to design equity-based incentives under the concurrent and the sequential development strategies. The conventional wisdom suggests that the sequential development strategy incurs a weakly lower cost but takes a longer time to complete a multi-task project than the concurrent strategy does. By contrast, we find that when the principal hires only one agent to perform all of the tasks and the agent’s effort is unobservable, the concurrent development strategy could result in a lower agency cost. In a wide range of parameter space, the concurrent development strategy not only reduces the principal’s cost but also reduces the completion time.