Many accountants seem to have accepted the existence of a 'reality gap' between management accounting's conventional wisdom based on the neoclassical economic theory of the firm and actual business practice. Whilst the former recommends the use of a decision relevant cost approach to pricing...

Economists regularly decry the persistence with which firms set prices above marginal cost and thus, according to the economists, fail to maximize profits. But it is the economists who have it wrong - first, because variable accounting costs are not always a good proxy for marginal economic...

The epilogue to Supply Chain Partners: Virginia Mason and Owens & Minor (A), the B case details the outcome of the issues discussed in Case A; namely that Virginia Mason and Owens & Minor did implement the TSCC contract. Virginia Mason also kept the suture contract with O&M because the TSCC model...

Virginia Mason Medical Center (VM) hired Owens & Minor (O&M) as its alpha vendor for medical/surgical supplies in 2004. By 2005, O&M was performing JIT and LUM services for VM, but they believed the pricing model in the industry was outdated. VM and O&M partnered to create the Total Supply Chain...

This paper analyzes the efficiency of three simple cost based pricing heuristics in a two-period capacity planning model with uncertain demand. All policies start with full cost introductory prices but differ with respect to second period pricing. Under quot;adaptive full cost pricingquot; the...

Banker and Hughes (1994) have demonstrated the economic sufficiency of activity-based unit costs for a firm's pricing and capacity decisions under uncertainty. This paper investigates the performance of the corresponding policy in a setting where the firm can adapt to changing demand conditions...

Full cost data are irrational for planning and pricing decisions from a microeconomic perspective, but surveys consistently indicate that managers prefer to use full cost data to make pricing decisions. This paper presents a model, called step-ABC, that supplies full cost data but makes users...

Using theoretical analysis and simulation experiments, we examine the usefulness of full costs for product pricing. We show that full costs are economically sufficient for pricing when a decision-maker (DM) jointly solves the capacity planning and pricing problems, and has enough discretion in...

This paper demonstrates that for a multi-product firm with fixed costs, full-cost markup rules impose a constraint on the relationship among product prices that may prevent the firm from achieving satisfactory profits even when satisfactory profits are feasible. For any given cost structure and...

Monroe Clock Company, a producer of electrical timers, is trying to decide how to price a new device by considering the method of overhead allocation and its impact on the cost of the household timer. The B case can be taught independently or in conjunction with the A case (UVA-C-2228), which...