Deaccessioning and Agency Costs of Free Cash Flow in Manager's Hands: A Formal Model

Abstract

The problem of agency costs of free cash flow in manager's hands has been firstly noted by Easterbrook and Jensen. We present one of the first attempts to formally model the problem in light of similar situation faced by managers of museums being allowed (or disallowed) to deaccession the artworks from their collections. We show that deaccessioning funds always lead to various forms of agency costs for the museum. This finding applies for any non-profit firm and its endowment. The task lying ahead is to formally prove the general conjecture also for the case of private for-profit firms.

Keywords

• eaccessioning
• agency costs
• free cash flow
• principal-agent problem
• non-profit firms