工人更應該獲得獎金 反對不合理的高管薪酬方案

If bonus or “incentive pay” schemes work so well for senior executives and bankers, why does everyone not get them? After all, many jobs involve making important decisions or taking risks. Is there anything about corporate decisions and financial risks that makes these categories of work special in terms of how they need to be incentivised and rewarded?

如果獎金或“激勵薪酬”方案對高管和銀行家如此有效，爲什麼不讓大家都得到這些？畢竟，許多工作都需要做出重大決定或者承擔風險。企業決策和金融風險還有其他因素讓這些領域的工作如此特殊，以至於它們在激勵和獎酬方面需要得到特別安排嗎？

The conventional answer is that a bonus scheme or incentive plan will indeed encourage the recipients to make more money for the shareholders or clients on whose behalf they act. And while there were some unfortunate abuses in the past, the schemes have been altered to focus on longer-term shareholder returns and to enable clawbacks. However, the conventional answer does not address my question: there are many workers acting as agents on behalf of others (taxpayers, shareholders, clients), so why are bonus and incentive schemes not more common?

傳統的回答是，獎金方案或激勵計劃的確將會鼓勵獲得者爲他們所代表的股東或客戶賺更多的錢。儘管過去有一些令人遺憾的濫用，但這些方案已經調整爲聚焦於長期股東回報和索回權。然而，傳統答案並未解決我的問題：有許多勞動者在工作中都是作爲其他人（納稅人、股東、客戶）的代理人做事，那麼獎金和激勵方案爲何沒有更普遍一些？

A classic paper on the “principal-agent problem” (how you encourage somebody else to act in your best interests rather than theirs when you hire them) by Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom pointed out that the conventional answer makes the mistake of assuming that jobs are simple and consist only of one task. In reality, agents — such as executives acting on behalf of shareholders — have multiple tasks with many dimensions. Some of these will be easier to measure than others.

本特•霍姆斯特姆(Bengt Holmstrom)和保羅•米爾格龍(Paul Milgrom)在一篇關於委託-代理問題（你在僱傭其他人的時候，如何鼓勵他們代表你而非他們自己的最佳利益）的經典報告中指出，傳統答案犯的錯誤是，假定工作都是簡單的，而且只包括一項任務。在現實中，代理人——比如代表股東利益的高管——承擔着多項任務，有許多維度。其中一些任務和維度比其他更容易衡量。

As the two economists note, if you use incentive pay to get teachers, say, to raise pupils’ test scores, the test scores will go up, but other desirable, unmeasurable attributes such as intellectual curiosity or exploration of the arts will suffer. Better to pay a fixed salary to achieve effort across the whole range of desired outcomes. Despite their warning, we have, of course, ended up with incentive pay in education in the UK, albeit indirectly via school inspection criteria and national targets; pupils are being taught to pass tests to their detriment and the economy’s.

正如這兩位經濟學家指出的那樣，如果你使用激勵薪酬讓教師提高學生的測試成績，那麼測試分數將會提高，但其他可取但不可衡量的品質（比如求知慾，或者對藝術的探索）將被忽視。不如支付固定薪資，讓人努力實現希望獲得的全面結果。儘管他們提出了警告，但英國教育界還是推出了激勵薪酬制度，儘管是通過學校檢查標準和國家目標間接推行的；以應考爲宗旨的教育，對學生們不利，對經濟也不利。

The point is that pay structures not only incentivise effort and direct risk-taking, they also determine the worker’s allocation of effort between different tasks. The design of pay schemes would be easier if jobs could be designed to separate the different tasks. But if not, the general conclusion is that incentive pay schemes are less desirable the harder it is to measure and monitor outcomes.

關鍵在於，薪酬結構不僅激勵努力和直接冒險，而且還決定勞動者在不同任務間的精力分配。如果工作可以從設計上被分解成不同的任務，薪酬方案的設計將會更容易。但如果不能，一般的結論是，結果越難衡量和監測，激勵薪酬方案就越不可取。

This clearly helps explain why bonus schemes and incentive plans tend to be tied to easily observable indicators such as the share price or a year’s trading profits. It also helps explain why such schemes so badly distort behaviour, incentivising short-term over long-term gains and quarterly share price increases over customer satisfaction.

這顯然有助於解釋爲何獎金方案和激勵計劃往往與股價或者全年交易利潤等容易觀察的指標密切相關。它也有助於解釋此類計劃爲何如此嚴重地扭曲行爲，刺激高管重視短期而非長期效益，重視季度股價漲幅而非客戶滿意度。

The more complex the job, the more dimensions involved — as in being a corporate chief executive, say — the less justification there is for an incentive reward scheme. This is reinforced in the specific context of shareholder principals and chief executives, when the latter are responsible for the value of the assets they are managing on behalf of the company’s owners. Incentives linked to whatever can easily be measured lead agents to turn their efforts away from maintaining and enhancing the value of the asset over time.

工作越複雜，涉及的維度越多——比如說企業的首席執行官負責的工作——激勵獎酬方案的理由就越不充足。就他們作爲股東代理人和首席執行官的角色而言更是如此——後者負責其代表公司所有者所掌管的資產的價值。隨着時間的推移，與可以被輕易衡量的指標掛鉤的激勵，導致代理人不再努力保持和增強資產價值。

Professor Holmstrom and Prof Milgrom thought they had done a good job of explaining many pay structures that were puzzling from the perspective of the simple view that people will work harder in exchange for pay that rewards the effort. For example, sales commission is found in industries where the output is easy to measure, but not so often in those where there is a quality dimension. But they went badly wrong when they diverted sales peoples’ efforts away from quality, as in financial services mis-selling. As the economy becomes increasingly complex and intangible, monitoring and measuring seem ever harder. The simplistic case for bonus and incentive pay schemes grows ever weaker.

霍姆斯特姆教授和米爾格龍教授認爲，他們很好地解釋了許多從簡單觀點看令人困惑的薪酬結構——這種簡單觀點是，人們將更努力工作以獲得獎勵這種努力的薪酬。例如，銷售佣金在產出容易衡量的行業很普遍，但在那些具有質量維度的行業就不是那麼常見了。但是，當佣金促使銷售人員不關注質量的時候就會出大問題，就像金融服務業的不當銷售一樣。隨着經濟日益複雜和無形，監測和衡量似乎越來越難。獎金和激勵薪酬方案的簡單化理由越來越站不住腳。

Indeed, the best arrangement would seem to be the opposite of the pattern we observe now. Corporate executives and senior bankers doing complex jobs involving many impossible-to-monitor activities are the last people who ought to be paid via an incentive scheme; while bonuses for fast-food workers or shop-floor employees make more sense.

的確，最好的安排似乎與我們現在觀察到的模式相反。企業高管和資深銀行家的複雜工作包含許多不可能監測的活動，他們是最不應該通過激勵方案獲得薪酬的人，而對快餐工人或者車間僱員支付獎金更有道理。

Shareholders are right to be rebelling against ludicrous executive pay packages. But the rebellion needs to go much further and demand fixed salaries for the most senior people. If the chief executive of a company seriously tells me, as a shareholder, that he will not put in as much effort as he otherwise would unless I link his pay to a handful of metrics, I have every reason to be doubtful about hiring him to do the job.

股東反對不合理的高管薪酬方案是正確的。但這種反對需要更進一步，要求對頂級高管發放固定薪資。如果一位首席執行官嚴肅地告訴作爲一名股東的我，如果我不將他的薪酬與一系列衡量標準掛鉤，他的努力就會大打折扣，我完全有理由懷疑要不要僱傭他做事。