Executive stock options: Early exercise provisions and risk-taking incentives

Traditional executive stock option plans allow fixed numbers of options to vest peri-odically, independent of stock price performance. Because such options may climb deep in-the-money long before the manager can exercise them, they can exacerbate risk aversion in project selection. Making the proportion of options that vest a gradually increasing function of the stock price can ensure that appropriate numbers of options are retained while they provide risk-taking incentives, but are exercised once they have lost their convexity. "Progressive performance vesting" can allow the firm more efficiently to rebalance the manager's risk-taking incentives.