Strategic delegation in oligopolistic tournaments

This paper considers a two-stage game with two owners and two managers. At the first stage, the owners choose a linear combination of profits and sales as incentives for their managers. At the second stage, the two managers compete in an oligopolistic tournament against each other. The findings substantially differ from the results for Cournot or Bertrand oligopoly: There exist asymmetric equilibria where one owner puts a positive weight on sales and the other a negative one, although the structure of the game is completely symmetric. If the influence of noise vanishes, the owner of the more aggressive firm will even induce sales maximization to his manager in order to preempt his competitor. © Springer-Verlag 2005.