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| What Leads to the Coexistence between “Funds Making Money” and “Investors Losing Money”？—A Theoretical Explanation Based on Common Agency Theory |
| LI Xuefeng, QI Xiao, XU Rong
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School of Finance, Nankai University; Institute of Chinese Path to Modernization, Nankai University;
School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University; Happy City Research Institute, Hangzhou City University |
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Abstract Mutual fund is a popular financial instrument that a few professionals serve most non-professionals for operating funds to earn higher returns, but it is often complained by lots of fund holders that “funds make money while investors lose money”. Intuitively, in 2022, there are over 10,000 mutual funds with total size over 26 trillion yuan (21.5% of China's GDP that year) in China. Among them, all the stock funds and stock-oriented hybrid funds earned over 1.5 billion average weighted net profit themselves while made about-18.23% average weighted return for their fund holders. Existing research has worked on explaining this phenomenon, criticizing fund holders' irrationality as the main reason. But this only explains why investors lose money, as it ignores the fact that the interest between fund holders, fund managers as well as fund management companies should have been highly consistent due to funds' mechanism. Moreover, most papers, affected by the corporate-based form in the US, take fund management companies and fund managers, or fund management companies and fund holders, as a whole and investigate their relationship, while ignoring the truth that fund management companies and fund holders have heterogenous incentives on fund managers under the form of contractual fund in China.
In view of this, based on the common agency theory (multi-principals vs. one agent), we constructed a game model that describes the interests, incentives and behavior among fund management companies, fund managers and fund holders in China. The general framework is as follows: (1) Fund holders' income is determined by fund's performance; fund management companies' income is determined by fund's size (fixed management fee rate); fund managers' income is determined by both fund's size (scale-based compensation) and fund's performance (performance-based compensation). (2) Fund's size is determined by fund holders' purchasing and redemption, and fund holders' purchasing and redemption are determined by their “rationality” (how they react to fund's last-period performance). (3) Fund's performance is determined by fund managers' effort, and fund managers' effort is determined by the incentives of fund management companies (via scale-based compensation and performance-based compensation) and fund holders (via how they purchase and redeem), as well as how fund managers weight them. (4) Fund holders choose how and how much their subscription and redemption react to fund's performance in the last period, fund management companies choose how much they compensate fund managers on both fund's size and performance, and fund managers choose how much they weight different incentives to maximize their net incomes. Under this framework, we then prove that: (1) If fund holders are “rational” (purchase funds with positive last-period performance and redeem funds with negative last-period performance), the “equilibrium” of the game will be that all parties focus on improving or compensating for fund's performance and can all “make money”. (2) If fund holders have a disposition effect (redeem funds with positive last-period performance and keep holding funds with non-positive last-period performance), the equilibrium of the game will be that fund management companies and fund managers both seek to maintain “zero performance” on every single fund and to issue more funds (to make money via management fees), leading to the result that “fund makes money while investor loses money”. Meanwhile, we set proper parameter values according to both market practice as well as academic research to run numerical simulation to prove the robustness of our game model. Thus, we finally propose following policy implications: (1) Since rationality is the key determinant of the coordination of interests of all parties, fund holders should be educated as investors to increase their rationality under the current form of contractual fund. (2) Pilot scheme of the corporate-based form, which may eliminate the potential interest conflicts between fund management companies and fund holders by “merging” them as one.
Our marginal contributions may include: (1) Our model takes fund management companies, fund managers and fund holders into account rather than consider either fund management companies and fund managers or companies and fund holders as one single party as most papers did, thus focusing on the governance problem of public funds in China. (2) We are the first to build a theoretical game model describing the contractual funds' operation in China, thus digging out the root of how different market subjects choose to behave and provide a new perspective and the theoretical basis for future research. (3) Using our game model, we provide a fundamental theoretical explanation to why funds make money while investors lose money, giving a deeper understanding of its reasons and solutions. Our future work based on this paper is to refine the model by relaxing assumptions to expand its applicability to more types of funds (such as close-end funds, regular open-end funds, etc.) and explaining more problems (such as floating management rate reform).
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Received: 26 October 2023
Published: 02 May 2024
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