We study the implications of introducing ethics into the traditional principal-agent model. In our model, the principal specifies a standard for effort at the time of contracting and the agent suffers a utility loss if he chooses not to provide the standard after agreeing to the contract. The...

We show that prices and incentives recommended by the salesforce literature when targeting a profitable segment can attract unprofitable customers, particularly when salespeople have high productivity and low risk (i.e., risk aversion times uncertainty). Therefore, when customers are...

Researchers in accounting and economics have established that financial controls can diminish intrinsic motivation in the subordinate when they are intentionally imposed by the superior. We study the ability of a non-financial control to generate a similar crowding out effect on honest reporting...

While managers commonly possess private information regarding future production cost when developing their cost budget, they also face outcome uncertainty regarding that future cost. This outcome uncertainty, however, has largely been ignored by experimental researchers examining various...

We argue that the market for audit services closely resembles a common value procurement (seller's) auction, where auditors generate a private estimate of the actual cost of an audit engagement prior to quoting the client a price. Thus, we conduct a systematic examination of audit pricing and...

Policy makers and corporations have recently emphasized a code of ethics as an effective aspect of corporate governance. The corporate governance literature in accounting, however, provides little empirical or theoretical support for this emphasis. We address this gap between public policy and...

We examine the effect of endogenous contract selection on budgetary slack using two slack-inducing contracts found in the literature: a trust contract where the superior must accept the subordinate’s budget and a discretion contract where the superior can accept or reject the budget. Because...

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...

Prior archival studies of analysts' forecasts have found evidence for systematic underreaction, systematic overreaction, and systematic optimism bias. Easterwood and Nutt (1999) attempt to reconcile the conflicting evidence by testing the robustness of Abarbanell and Bernard's (1992)...