Title
Monitoring mechanisms in new product development with risk-averse project manager
Abstract
It is necessary for one senior executive (she) to monitor her project manager (he) who conducts early research stage followed by a later development stage in new product development. In this paper, we analyze two monitoring mechanisms: (1) the idea information-based monitoring (IM) mechanism wherein the senior executive engages one supervisor to monitor the project manager's idea information; (2) the effort-based monitoring (EM) mechanism wherein the senior executive engages another supervisor to monitor the project manager's effort. Within the framework of uncertainty theory, we first present two classes of bilevel uncertain principal-agent monitoring models, and then derive their respective optimal incentive contracts. We find that the senior executive should set the incentive term as high as possible to motivate each supervisor to monitor the project manager's idea information and effort no matter how much the design idea value is. We also find that EM mechanism can always dominate IM mechanism when the monitoring costs are equal. Moreover, comparing with a no monitoring scenario, we identify two values of monitoring: the value of monitoring idea information and the value of monitoring effort. Our results show that adopting IM and EM mechanisms can improve the senior executive's profits obtained in the no monitoring scenario when the revenue uncertainty is sufficiently low. The results also indicate that the value of monitoring idea information decreases as the risk aversion level of the project manager improves, while the value of monitoring effort shows the opposite feature.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/s10845-014-0993-5
J. Intelligent Manufacturing
Keywords
Field
DocType
New product development,Monitoring mechanism,Information asymmetry,Incentive contract,Uncertainty theory
Supervisor,Revenue,Mathematical optimization,Information asymmetry,Incentive,Knowledge management,Project manager,Risk aversion,Engineering,New product development,Process management,Uncertainty theory
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
28
3
0956-5515
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
14
0.59
18
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kai Yang11218.47
Yanfei Lan221815.92
Ruiqing Zhao358846.97