The price of motivating corporate top managers using warrants

Finance and investments
Authors:
Abstract:

In today’s economic environment, an important characteristic of top-echelon executives includes not only their qualification and business reputation but also their motivation for the company development. The majority of present-day investigators have come to a general consensus thatthe performance of the top management in a company must be objectively evaluated by the market, rather than by the subjective human factor (i.e., by the top managers themselves). While using warrants to evaluate the motivation of the top-managers is undoubtedly appealing, it is evident that this motivation, as any other, must have a certain value for the company, and needs to be pre-evaluated. Even though the due date for new warrants will occur in the far future, the market is even now revaluating corporate securities on the basis of future opportunities. The common-stock value is adjusted with allowance for anticipated dilution that results from exercising warrants. The Black–Scholes model is used in most cases in order to evaluate European options, since it provides a conservative, i.e., the lowest, option value. However, a model with dividends for a European-type warrant should be used for more realistic corporate business presentation. In such a case, the warrant and stock values can be theoretically adjusted until the warrant value has become equal to zero. The stock value, however, will significantly decrease as compared to the original market value. But in actual practice, markets ineffectually respond to issuing warrants by companies; therefore, the stock value declines in a minor way. We then recommend to decide upon the adjustment of the fair stock price which would be following the first specification of the fair warrant price. In this case, the price of motivating top managers using warrants is calculated through multiplying the magnitude of reduction in the stock value by the number of company shares in circulation.