Dressler Efrat, Mugerman Yevgeny
School of Business Administration, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
School of Business Administration, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel.
J Bus Ethics. 2023;183(4):1089-1112. doi: 10.1007/s10551-022-05108-y. Epub 2022 Apr 15.
Through a combination of a controlled experiment and a survey, we examine the effect of voting power on shareholders' voting behavior at general meetings. To avoid a selection bias, common in archival voting data, we exogenously manipulate shareholders' power to affect the outcome. Our findings suggest that, when it comes to corporate decisions involving conflicts of interest, voting power nudges shareholders to oppose management and to choose the "right" alternative, that is, vote against a proposal which does not serve the company's best interest. This effect obtained even when the dissenting vote contravened the choices of all other voters. Furthermore, the drive "to do the right thing" was established as significant, above and beyond the size of the economic stake. We also demonstrate that strategic voting among institutional investors is contingent on voting power: when in a position to affect the outcome of a vote, institutional investors tend to eschew strategic considerations and display fewer consistent patterns in their voting, compared to situations in which their ability to make a difference is limited. In anticipation of a "bad" proposal to be put to vote at the general shareholder meeting, institutional investors prefer to negotiate terms with management beforehand, and vote against it only after such negotiations fail. Our results shed new light on the "behind the scenes" processes in shareholder voting and underscore the importance of institutional investor agency to corporate governance, accountability, and minority shareholder representation.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10551-022-05108-y.
通过控制实验和调查相结合的方式，我们研究了投票权对股东大会上股东投票行为的影响。为避免档案投票数据中常见的选择偏差，我们通过外部手段操纵股东权力以影响投票结果。我们的研究结果表明，在涉及利益冲突的公司决策中，投票权促使股东反对管理层并选择“正确”的选项，即投票反对不符合公司最佳利益的提案。即使反对票与所有其他投票者的选择相悖，这种影响依然存在。此外，“做正确的事”的驱动力被证明是显著的，超越了经济利益的规模。我们还证明，机构投资者之间的策略性投票取决于投票权：当能够影响投票结果时，与他们影响力有限的情况相比，机构投资者往往会避开策略性考量，投票中表现出的一致模式也更少。预计在股东大会上会对一项“糟糕”的提案进行投票时，机构投资者更倾向于事先与管理层协商条款，只有在这种协商失败后才投票反对。我们的研究结果为股东投票的“幕后”过程提供了新的见解，并强调了机构投资者代理对公司治理、问责制和少数股东代表性的重要性。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s10551-022-05108-y获取的补充材料。
