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Re:MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations by marcosdumay on Thursday June 11, 2020 @11:56AM (#23490154)
> The top layer of management's target is the desired outcome.

Kinda. Top managers tend to have a much shorter time preference than shareholders. The incentives are aligned only when all shareholders are of the active trading kind (if that ever happens on any company).

Re:MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations by TeMPOraL on Thursday June 11, 2020 @01:22PM (#23491074)
Isn't there also an additional misalignment caused by shareholders who hold shares only to speculate on the stock market? Those shareholders don't care about long-term goals of the company, but only about short-term stock performance they can use to jump sell their shares high, and then buy some other shares low.
Re:MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations by PeterisP on Thursday June 11, 2020 @03:36PM (#23492564)
Short term speculators have no direct influence on the management (other than through share price i.e. the money they promise to give to the long-term shareholders to sell their shares) because they don't hold the shares long enough to vote on the shareholder's meetings - the long- and mid-term shareholders can order the board on what the priority should be or replace the board if it's not aligned with these goals; and there's a class of activist investors who buy shares in order to do just that, to steer the company somewhere else - but in order to do that, you can't be a short-term speculator, you have to buy, vote and wait before selling.