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...

This study examines the behavioral impact of an information system, and how that impact varies with the information system's precision, in an internal reporting environment. In order to examine behavioral effects, we do not permit the owner to contract on the system's output. We propose that a...

This study examines control in a teamwork setting, experimentally investigating two financial incentive systems that have been proposed in the agency theory-based analytic literature. Both systems rely on mutual monitoring, the ability of team members to observe each other's actions. However,...

Because of conflicting incentives among participants, collaborations (e.g., strategic alliances, joint ventures, and work teams) present a significant control challenge to managerial accountants. On the one hand, formal controls such as sanctioning and monitoring systems improve cooperation by...

Because of conflicting incentives among participants, inter-firm (e.g., strategic alliances and joint ventures) and intra-firm (e.g., work teams) collaborations present a significant control challenge to managerial accountants. On the one hand, formal controls such as sanctioning and monitoring...