Opportunity cost is a central concept in decision making. It is difficult to measure because it is the value associated with opportunities foregone. In this paper, we characterize three time-based dimensions of resources to help understand and estimate opportunity costs. These dimensions capture...

Many accounting textbooks state that the opportunity cost of idle fixed assets is zero. A few exceptions refer to repair, overhaul, employee vacation and congestion, giving rise to positive opportunity cost. We show that in important and frequently encountered situations, idled assets have...

Many accounting textbooks state that the opportunity cost of idle fixed assets is zero. A few exceptions may refer to factors such as repair and overhaul, employee vacation and congestion that give rise to strictly positive opportunity cost. We show that in important and frequently encountered...

This paper presents a framework to help decisions makers better measure the opportunity cost of resources with different granularity. We characterize resources by the intrinsic lumpiness of acquisition (acquisition granularity), storability of benefits (expiration granularity), and control over...

Matching talents to tasks is an important part of job design. Organizations routinely use performance thresholds to group agents by talent. We see thresholds defined both in terms of an individual's own performance (absolute value) and in terms of peer performance (percentile). Intuition...

Recent literature on activity based product costing suggests that using product costs to make long-run product and capacity planning decisions is economically sound. This conclusion relies on the assumption that capacity resources impose quot;softquot; constraints (i.e., capacity can be...

We examine the principal's preference for a public predecision information system that produces a signal about a parameter of the firm's production function. We show that the discreteness of action space plays a crucial role in establishing the principal's preference for suppressing the release...

Using an agency theory framework, we examine the effect of managerial overconfidence on the interaction between planning and control problems. We consider a typical setting in which a manager makes an investment decision involving project selection and a production decision to implement the...

We examine a principal-agent setting in which the principal uses a performance measurement system for multiple purposes to provide incentives and for retention decisions. The principal chooses the nature and extent of bias in the system, which determines whether the performance report is...