On the shareholders versus stakeholders debate
Camelia Bejan  1@  
1 : University of Washington, Bothell

The paper discusses a model of endogenous uncertainty in which a firm controls the risk in the market through its choice of investment and thus exerts an externality on all the market participants. I show that, by recasting the model in a states-of-nature framework, what appears as a direct, non-pecuniary externality in the probabilistic formulation of the model is, in fact, indistinguishable from the standard pecuniary externality generated by monopoly behavior. As a monopolist, the firm exerts an indirect externality on its stakeholders through its effect on prices (in this case, the intertemporal consumption prices). Inefficiency of the equilibrium is due to under-investment (in the prevention of risk), a result that echoes the standard feature of a monopolistic equilibrium. With a homogenous consumer population, the monopolist can achieve efficiency by practicing a non-linear pricing scheme, thus showing that a pure shareholder value maximization motive can lead to efficient investment in the prevention of risks. Alternatively, standard monopoly regulation procedures can also lead to efficiency, and their implementation can be done without the knowledge of the monopolist's cost function.


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