Opportunism in capital budget recommendations: The effects of past performance and its attributions

Abstract

This study uses an experiment to examine the separate and combined effects of managers' loss aversion and their causal attributions about their divisions' performance on tendencies to make goal-incongruent capital budget recommendations. We find that managers' recommendations are biased by their loss aversion. In particular, managers of high-performing divisions are more likely than managers of low-performing divisions to propose investments that maximize their division's short-term profits at the expense of the firm's long-term value. We also find that managers' recommendations are biased by their causal attributions. In particular, managers are more likely to propose investments that maximize their division's short-term profits at the expense of the firm's long-term value when they attribute their division's performance to external causes (e.g., task difficulty or luck) rather than to internal causes (e.g., managerial ability or effort). Further, the effects of causal attributions are greater for managers of high-performing divisions than for managers of low-performing divisions. The study's findings are important because loss aversion and causal attributions are often manifested in firms. Thus, they may bias managers' decisions, which in turn may be detrimental to the firms' long-term value.