We examine the realism of the assumption of self-interested opportunism in agency theory. We place subjects into manager/producer pairs and set parameters so that the producer extracts the highest share of residual earnings from the manager by setting the budget at zero (100% slack) and...

Although neoclassical economic theory predicts that fixed cost magnitude and fixed cost reporting format will not influence short-term pricing decisions, these factors systematically affected pricing decisions in a duopoly experiment. Increasing fixed cost magnitude (a pure sunk cost in this...

Although neoclassical economic theory predicts that fixed cost magnitude and fixed cost reporting format will not influence short-term pricing decisions, these factors systematically affected pricing decisions in a duopoly experiment. Increasing fixed cost magnitude (a pure sunk cost in this...

Running a contest can help managers elicit creative ideas from employees by providing employees with incentives to develop and share ideas that will help the firm. Little is known, however, about how contest design affects the outcomes of subjectively evaluated creativity-based contests. We...

This study experimentally examines how the generosity of an incentive contract offered by an experimental firm to a pair of employees and a feedback system that provides information on individual employee cooperativeness affect the sustainability of cooperation. Both contract generosity and the...

Contract audits aimed at reducing information asymmetry and transaction costs are frequently used in imperfect markets such as defense procurement. This contradicts predictions from standard economic theory. We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate this paradox. Our laboratory setup...

This paper analyzes whether the new business segment reporting disclosure rules, SFAS 131, will actually provide capital market participants with more predictive ability than the previous rules. For this we conduct three experiments. Two experiments with advanced accounting students as subjects,...

This paper examines experimentally the reputation building role of disclosure in an investment / trust game. It provides experimental evidence in support of sequential equilibrium behavior in a finitely repeated investment / trust game where information asymmetry raises the possibility of...

This paper investigates managerial discretion in compensation decisions in a team (i.e., joint production) setting. Specifically, we investigate the conditions under which managers tasked with allocating a discretionary bonus pool are willing to incur a personal cost to obtain ex post...

Management accounting scholars generally accept the proposition that our subject matter requires a multi-disciplinary approach to study. The question of what are appropriate norms for conducting research in that environment is not as clear as it may be in more homogenous research communities....