Experience with the 75 years of development of, and increasing reliance on, written standards of corporate financial reporting suggests that balancing them with community's social norms may be a better option. “True and fair” override of written standards could serve as the moral compass of...

The links among better financial reporting, better markets, and better economy and society are arguable, but they remain poorly understood. The addition of IFRS to the set of available alternatives may improve these linkages, but granting them monopoly status does not. Claims that the universal...

We investigated the benefits (more accurate valuations) obtained from the use of more specific measures, such as the use of specific price indexes, rather than a general price index, to approximate the current value of historical cost accounting numbers. We found the valuation accuracy function...

We conducted a field study of the process by which a company and prospective auditors court each other and enter an engagement. The Request-for-Proposal (RFP) process we observed had been triggered by an audit partner rotation and governed by recent legislation empowering the audit committee to...

Standard setters and most academics maintain that accounting standards ought to rest on a set of guiding principles stated explicitly in a “conceptual framework.” The FASB and IASB are currently involved in a project to refine conceptual framework documents developed earlier. At this point,...

Properties of many important valuation rules can be quantified, examined and compared in a unified framework to assist policy decisions. Valuation rules can be viewed as econometric estimators of unobserved values of aggregates. Which valuation rule has minimum mean squared error (relative to...

Junk email or spam is rapidly choking off email as a reliable and efficient means of communication over the Internet. While the demand for human attention increases rapidly with the volume of information and communication, the supply of attention hardly changes. Markets are a social institution...

With increasing numbers of consumers in auction marketplaces, we highlight some recent approaches that bring additional economic, social, and psychological factors to bear on existing economic theory to better understand and explain consumer behavior in auctions. We also highlight specific...

Business firms as well as each of their subunits can be thought of as a set of contracts in which participating agents seek their own goals. Participants contribute resources, expecting to receive in exchange more than the opportunity cost of their contributions. For this system to work, the...

Design of contracts that define firms, and their accounting systems depends on the conditions in the firm's factor and product markets. We examine the fundamental difficulty of defining and developing "uniform" accounting for diverse economic environments across countries and compare the...