Executives confront potentially conflicting pressures—to maximize shareholder wealth in the long term and to appease shareholders in the near term. Because near-term pressures must be addressed to preserve tenure and to realize the potential benefits of long-term strategies, executives are increasingly likely to rely on shareholder mollification initiatives. We develop a behavioral-agency theoretical framework to study how stock repurchase programs are used to help top managers appease shareholders. Analysis of 250 large U.S. firms suggests that stock repurchase programs are variously a function of information asymmetry, risky stock-based incentives, and performance expectations. 1 Top executives must manage multiple contingencies in order to preserve their positions. Some of these contingencies call for potentially contradictory efforts. For instance, the U.S. system of corporate governance presumes that top executives ’ primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder wealth (Jensen & Meckling, 1976; Shleifer & Vishny, 1997), which in turn often requires investment in and commitment to long-term risky projects (Ghemawat, 1988). Strategies to maximize shareholder wealth are also necessarily time-dependent, and benefits may become

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