研究期間:10110~10209;“Tournament incentive” theory describes that besides the performance-based incentives, the pay differentials between CEO and the next layer of managers can also serve as an incentive alignment mechanism. The recent finance researches, however, find that a large pay gap across company hierarchy does not only increase the firm profitability but also increase the firm riskiness. Such a finding raises the concern that whether some firms may fail to maintain the granted tournament incentive at optimal level, and thus induce overly high firm risks at the expense of profitability? Due to the high information asymmetry and high uncertainty in R&D investment projects, we suggest that examining the relationship between tournament incentive and R&D investment efficiency can shield lights to such research question.