The simple reason for that is that he or she owns and manages the company, and therefore makes the decisions on issues such as salary schemes. The decision of implementing profit sharing is largely based on the risk seeking behavior of the decision maker. Nevertheless, the introduction of profit sharing in companies is not only depending on the owners risk seeking behavior but also on that of the employees. Logically, this observation will especially become clear in SME’s, first of all because the hierarchy is most of the time shorter and flatter. And second because of the smaller amount of employees on which the owner is relying. Hence the closer the employees stand to the employers, and the smaller the amount of employees is, the more influence their risk seeking behavior will have on implementing or not implementing profit sharing.

Nonetheless, there is still the question “who will, most likely, implement such a scheme?” The owner and employee will, from a rational point of view, always seek to increase their own earnings, but will they take risk for that? The established literature on this topic (cf. Stiglitz 1974; Mukhopadhyay and Pendse 1983; Chang 2006) clearly describes that, when implementing profit sharing, the employees will take over a part of the risk. However, the acceptance and thereby implementation of profit sharing will not take place if the employee shows risk averse behavior. The entrepreneur is by definition the one who takes the risk and thereby the higher return. Most of the employees will not be willing to take this risk, and are employees instead of entrepreneurs because of the stable income. This major issue in profit sharing is either overcome when there is a guaranteed wage that represents the base-wage before profit sharing, or all employees are risk taking, which seams to be more likely with higher earning employees (Samuelson 1977 p.15), or finally, a differentiated system is implemented.