Opportunity cost is a central concept in decision making. It is difficult to measure because it is the value associated with opportunities foregone. In this paper, we characterize three time-based dimensions of resources to help understand and estimate opportunity costs. These dimensions capture...

In the neoclassical model of the firm, value surplus of the firm is assumed to accrue to its owner. Contract model suggests a distribution of the surplus among various agents depending on the imperfections of the markets in which they transact with the firm. If the share of the surplus to an...

Business firms as well as each of their subunits can be thought of as a set of contracts in which participating agents seek their own goals. Participants contribute resources, expecting to receive in exchange more than the opportunity cost of their contributions. For this system to work, the...

Historically, norms of accounting played an important role in corporate financial reporting. Starting with the federal regulation of securities, accounting norms have been progressively replaced by written standards. While social norms are maintained through an informal process of social as well...

The past decade has seen many changes in audit liability regimes of the US and the UK, and more may be on the way. These include LLP status for audit firms, proportional liability, and the introduction of various forms of liability caps through contract in engagement letters. These changes may...

Joel S. Demski's work is characterized by the austere discipline of applying the economizing principle to accounting and management phenomena. In natural sciences optimization is used as a structural principle for understanding the organization of the physical universe. As social scientists...

Financial reporting environment of the world is dominated today by a top down push for uniform financial reporting standards. The advantages of uniformity and monopoly standards have been well-publicized compared to their disadvantages. No language, accounting included, can flourish under the...

Junk e-mail or spam is rapidly choking off e-mail as a reliable and efficient means of communication over the Internet. Although the demand for human attention increases rapidly with the volume of information and communication, the supply of attention hardly changes. Markets are a social...

We present data on privacy practices in e-commerce under the European Union's (EU's) formal regulatory regime prevailing in the United Kingdom (U.K.), and compare it to the data from a previous study of United States (U.S.) practices that evolved in the absence of government laws or enforcement....

Under what conditions is government regulation better at protecting market participants than private, evolving, market-driven protections? An intriguing answer to that question emerges if we examine a relatively unregulated area of market participant protection: e-commerce privacy. In the United...