Bloomfield, Marvão, and Spagnolo (2023) establish an interesting yet puzzling finding: Firms in concentrated industries that form cartels are more likely to use relative performance evaluation (RPE) compensation arrangements for their top managers. The paper interprets this as evidence that cartel members constrain managers' incentives to engage in costly sabotage when their compensation depends on their peer firms' performance. I argue that successful costly sabotage to gain an RPE advantage is extremely unlikely and that costly sabotage is more likely among cartel firms than non-cartel firms. It therefore is an unlikely explanation of the paper's main finding. I propose an alternative explanation, that RPE benchmarks include firms that are not cartel member firms.

Bloomfield、Marvão 和 Spagnolo（2023）提出了一个有趣但令人费解的发现：形成卡特尔的集中行业中的公司更有可能对其高层管理人员使用相对绩效评估（RPE）薪酬安排。该论文将此解释为证据，表明卡特尔成员限制了管理者进行代价高昂的破坏活动的动机，因为他们的报酬取决于同行公司的业绩。我认为，为了获得 RPE 优势而成功进行代价高昂的破坏的可能性极小，而且卡特尔公司比非卡特尔公司更有可能进行代价高昂的破坏。因此，这不太可能解释该论文的主要发现。我提出另一种解释，即 RPE 基准包括非卡特尔成员公司。