CEO Succession Under Anticipatory Awareness Misalignment

We develop a dynamic model of chief executive officer (CEO) succession under anticipatory awareness misalignment: the divergence between the board’s and the CEO’s private beliefs about the firm’s strategic potential. The CEO chooses unobservable effort, may send costly noncontractible signals, and faces interim termination based on performance thresholds. We derive closed-form expressions for optimal CEO incentive intensity, effort, and fixed pay and show how they are influenced by belief misalignment, CEO capability, and market frictions. We present propositions that explain how belief alignment affects effort and pay, how misaligned types are separated through signaling, and how misalignment impacts firing thresholds and the matching of boards and CEO. We show that misalignment reduces incentive efficiency, increases fixed pay, and increases the probability of early dismissal. CEOs aligned with the board receive higher variable compensation; misaligned types must compensate with signals or accept weaker incentives. The model generates empirically testable predictions on compensation structure, retention, and succession outcomes. Funding: A. Camuffo and A. Gambardella acknowledge support from the H2020 European Research Council [Grant 101021061]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2025.20384 .