Defense of Bettina Mandl

Bettina Mandl successfully defended her Doctoral thesis “The Role of Cognitive Biases, Incentives, and Optimal Contracts in Accounting” at the University of Graz on May 29th. Her thesis was supervised by CAR’s Georg Schneider and Alfred Wagenhofer. The dissertation consists of two analytical essays and a literature review. The thesis investigates the impact of managerial overconfidence and overoptimism on various decision-making areas, such as investment, innovation, and contracting.
The first analytical paper investigates how overoptimism and overprecision affect the manager's incentives to provide innovative project ideas and to make optimal investment decisions in the owner's best interest. Her second paper analyzes the effect of managerial overconfidence and contracting on internal controls and how optimal contracting can motivate the overconfident manager to mitigate internal control weaknesses. The literature review examines the analytical and empirical literature on the role of managerial overconfidence and overoptimism in the three decision-making areas investment, innovation, and contracting.