This teaching note illustrates how reporting historical data, even when it is unverifiable, can be useful in improving productive efficiency. Historical cost accounting is evaluated in a simple multi-person setting with private information. Because the source of contracting frictions is limited...

This paper adopts a valuation perspective within an asymmetric information setting and explores properties of economic income. The optimal intertemporal contract induces an accrual component of income which would not exist absent the information problem. The contracting solution introduces a...

This paper adopts a valuation perspective within an asymmetric information setting and explores properties of economic income. The optimal intertemporal contract induces an accrual component of income which would not exist absent the information problem. The contracting solution introduces a...

The purpose of this paper is to study capital budgeting in a setting where emphasis is on control over project selection. We construct a model of a multidivisional firm in which there are no constraints on investment and all projects have a positive net present value. Nevertheless, we show that...

A simple two-period model with information asymmetry and restriction on transfers is used to induce an inter temporal relationship between a sequence of investment decisions. The owner's reputation for honoring commitments to ex post inefficient production decisions allows her to make efficient...

In this paper we establish an equivalence between accounting numbers and information. The information numbers are denominated in entropy which is a measure of uncertainty and is a function of probabilities only. Mutual information is defined as the reduction of entropy when an information source...

In a previous paper we establish the equality between accounting numbers and information in a classical Arrow-Debreu economy. One of the conditions is complete market, that is, there exists an Arrow-Debreu security for every possible state realization. In this paper, we relax this condition and...

We report on a panel discussion at the 2001 CMU Accounting Mini-conference under the title "Intellectual Foundations of Accounting." We provide a background and the motivation for the discussion and present the remarks by the four panelists. A number of perspectives are taken. Sunder emphasizes...