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Corporate governance is a recent concept that encompasses the costs caused by managerial misbehavior. It is concerned with how organizations in general, and corporations in particular, produce value and how that value is distributed among the members of the corporation, its stakeholders. The interrelation of value production and value distribution links the ubiquitous technological aspect (the production of value) with the moral and ethical dimension (the distribution of value). Corporate governance is concerned with this link in general, but more specifically with the moral and ethical dimensions of distributing the generated value among the stakeholders. Value in firms is created by firm-specific investments, and the motivation and coordination of value-enhancing activities and investment is protected by the power concentrated at the pyramidal top of the organization. In modern companies, it is the CEO and the top management who decide how to create value and how to distribute it among the relevant stakeholders. Due to asymmetric information and the imperfect nature of markets and contracts, adverse selection and moral hazard problems occur, where delegated (selected) managers could act in their own interest at the costs of other relevant stakeholders. Corporate governance can be understood as a two-tailed concept. The first aspect is about identifying the (most) relevant stakeholder(s), separating theory and practice into two different and conflicting streams: the stakeholder value approach and the shareholder value approach. The second aspect of the concept is about providing and analyzing different mechanisms, reducing the costs induced by moral hazard and adverse selection effects, and balancing out the motivation and coordination problems of the relevant stakeholders. Corporate governance is an interdisciplinary concept encompassing academic fields such as finance, economics, accounting, law, taxation, and psychology, among others. As countries differ according to their institutions (i.e., legal and political systems, norms, and rules), firms differ according to their size, age, dominant shareholders, or industries. Thus, concepts in corporate governance differ along these dimensions as well. And while the underlying characteristics vary in time, continuously or as a result of an exogenous shock, concepts in corporate governance are dynamic and static, offering a challenging field of interest for academics, policymakers, and firm managers.

Economists have long regarded healthcare as a unique and challenging area of economic activity on account of the specialized knowledge of healthcare professionals (HCPs) and the relatively weak market mechanisms that operate. This places a consideration of how motivation and incentives might influence performance at the center of research. As in other domains economists have tended to focus on financial mechanisms and when considering HCPs have therefore examined how existing payment systems and potential alternatives might impact on behavior. There has long been a concern that simple arrangements such as fee-for-service, capitation, and salary payments might induce poor performance, and that has led to extensive investigation, both theoretical and empirical, on the linkage between payment and performance. An extensive and rapidly expanded field in economics, contract theory and mechanism design, had been applied to study these issues. The theory has highlighted both the potential benefits and the risks of incentive schemes to deal with the information asymmetries that abound in healthcare. There has been some expansion of such schemes in practice but these are often limited in application and the evidence for their effectiveness is mixed. Understanding why there is this relatively large gap between concept and application gives a guide to where future research can most productively be focused.