The Incentives of Hedge Fund Fees and High-Water Marks∗ Paolo Guasoni y Jan Obłój z Boston University and University of Oxford Dublin City University
[email protected] [email protected] ∗We thank for helpful comments Hualei Chang, Jaksa Cvitanic, Damir Filipovic, Vicky Henderson, Semyon Malamud, Stavros Panageas, Tarun Ramadorai, Mihai Sirbu, Xun Yu Zhou, and seminar participants at the UK Financial Services Authority, Oxford, Cornell, London School of Economics, Fields Instutute, UC Santa Barbara, TU Vienna, SUNY Stony Brook, Edinburgh, and TU Berlin. yPartially supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DMS-0807994. zPartially supported by the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. 1 The Incentives of Hedge Fund Fees and High-Water Marks Abstract Hedge fund managers receive performance fees proportional to their funds’ profits, plus regular fees proportional to assets. Managers with constant relative risk aversion, constant investment opportunities, maximizing utility of fees at long horizons, choose constant Merton portfolios. The effective risk aversion depends on performance fees, which shrink the true risk aversion towards one. Thus, performance fees have ambiguous risk-shifting implications, depending on managers’ own risk aversion. Further, managers behave like investors acting on their own behalf, but facing drawdown constraints. A Stackelberg equilibrium between investors and managers trades off the costs of performance fees, with their potential to align preferences. Only aggressive investors voluntarily pay high performance fees, and only if managers are even more aggressive. Keywords: Hedge Funds, High-Water Marks, Performance Fees, Portfolio Choice, Incentives, Risk- shifting. 2 1 Introduction Hedge fund managers receive as performance fees a large fraction of their funds’ profits, in addition to regular fees proportional to funds’ assets.