We study the determinants of organizational slack in large decentralized firms and focus in particular on how management accounting systems (represented by business unit controllers) affect slack. We rely on an adverse selection model to derive several predictions and to motivate our tests....

This paper intends to contribute to the (bounded rationality) foundations of trust, showing how the concept of trust is related to the basic hypothesis on the behavior of the two people involved. First, I briefly review some definitions of trust found in the literature, and attempt to establish...

The paper Asymmetric Information, Incentives and Intrafirm Resource Allocation, by Harris, Kriebel and Raviv (H.K.R.), was published in the June 1982 issue of Management Science. In this article, written as part of this journal's 50-year anniversary celebration, we highlight the significance of...

We examine the realism of the assumption of self-interested opportunism in agency theory. We place subjects into manager/producer pairs and set parameters so that the producer extracts the highest share of residual earnings from the manager by setting the budget at zero (100% slack) and...

There has been increasing interest in firms in which workers strongly identify with their firm's success. It would seem apparent that such identification by workers should be considered as an integral element of the firm's control systems. However, much of the literature on the myriad forms of...

This study uses principal agent analysis to investigate how the principal’s use of performance measures in the agent’s compensation contract are affected by (1) links between performance measures and (2) substitute and complementary characteristics of an agent’s efforts. We show that the...

To address agents' moral hazard over effort, incentive contracts impose risk on the agents. As performance measures become noisier, the conventional agency analysis predicts that principals will reduce the incentive weights assigned to such measures. However, prior empirical results (Prendergast...

We show how information technology affects transfer pricing. With coarse information technology, negotiated transfer pricing has an informational advantage: managers agree to prices that approximate the firm's cost of internal trade more precisely than cost-based transfer prices. With...

Budgeting mechanisms help the CEO of a firm to restrict managerial discretion and therefore to mitigate the firm's agency problems. By using flexible budgets, the CEO allows the managers to efficiently adapt their actions to changing economic conditions. Alternatively, rigid budgets result in a...

In this paper we focus on fair value measurements in the Financial Crisis and its (continuing) aftermath. We consider different ways of measuring fair value; and we use the experience of economies under stress, and where markets deviate significantly from textbook models of symmetric information...