In the asymmetric cost behavior model, managers play an active role in determining cost behavior by adding or removing resources as activity changes. Cost stickiness occurs when managers deliberately retain slack resources resulting from a decline in sales activity between periods. Because both...

We synthesize the growing literature on asymmetric cost behavior — a new way of thinking about costs and, by extension, earnings. While the traditional cost behavior model describes a mechanistic relation between activity and costs, this alternative view recognizes the primitives of cost...

Central to the economic theory of sticky costs is the proposition that managers consider adjustment costs when changing resource levels. We test this proposition using employment protection legislation (EPL) provisions in different countries as a proxy for labor adjustment costs. Using a large...