We consider accounting from an evolutionary perspective. Accounting encompasses the creation of transactional records, the summarization of records in t-accounts, and the preparation of audited financial statements. Accounting's history spans at least 10,000 years dating back to the first human...

Strategic cost management of the E-supply chain is one new concept which integrates three fields: strategic cost management, supply chain management and internet application, and develops one of the most important tools about how to apply E-supply chain to the improvement of the competence in...

This paper will look at management control from the viewpoint of enhancing human cooperation within an organization. As control is about human behavior a perspective on control will be founded on a view on human agency. A general framework of cooperative control will be built based on two-stage...

This paper examines the role of multiple measures of performance in a principal-agent model incorporating both moral hazard and adverse selection. The outcome of interest to the principal depends stochastically on the agent’s unobservable ability and effort, while the principal implements a...

Using car dealership data, we examine the relevance of forward-looking (FL) and contemporaneous (CO) measures for pay-for-performance incentives (bonus, annual raise, promotions) for long-horizon employees. Economic models suggest that while contracts with FL performance measures mitigates the...

Despite its critical importance in the theory of the firm, marginal cost is unobservable in most production settings. Most cost accounting practices substitute average cost estimates for the unobservable marginal cost; moreover, some cost accounting measures include fixed costs as a component of...

Organizations are often facing the problem of determining the degree of investment in building information links with their suppliers and buyers to reduce costs, lead times, and quality problems, improve timely customized delivery, increase asset utilization and improve corporate profitability....

The diversity and complexity of the different types of passenger transportations in operation today invokes the need for an efficient transport service management system. Existing transportation models tend towards proffering solution for finding the least cost combination for delivering cargoes...

Accounting involves assigning numbers to events-quantifying them. Conventional wisdom holds that putting numbers to an argument enhances its persuasive power. However, little scholarly evidence exists to support or refute this claim, in accounting or elsewhere. In this paper, we develop an...

Business executives and academics frequently criticize budget-based compensation plans as providing incentives for subordinates to build slack into proposed budgets. In this paper, we examine whether either of two practices - using budgets to allocate scarce resources, or providing information...