In this paper, we seek to provide empirical documentation of the effect of Activity-Based Costing (ABC) information on product and customer-related decisions made by managers in a company. Proponents of ABC argue that when an entity implements ABC, it reaps at least two important benefits:...

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...

Using archival and published sources, the author studies the evolution of thinking, teaching and writing at the Harvard Business School from 1908 to 1980 in the areas of cost/management accounting, financial accounting, and management control, including information systems, and how the Business...

We derive equations that allow managers and analysts to quickly forecast percentage change in profit and perform what if analyses without the need to build spreadsheet models or develop pro-forma income statements. The equations specify the relationship between the changes in costs and profit in...

Recent developments have sparked a renewed interest concerning risk related topics in nonfinancial companies. Risk management issues directly touch the domain of management accounting and control. In Germany, topics related to the support of corporate or enterprise risk management are commonly...

We study the role of peer groups in determining the structure and the total amount of executive compensation. Our analysis is based on a standard agency model in which the agent's reservation utility is related to the peer group used for performance evaluation. Our main result is that the...

In this paper, we study a setting where a firm (principal) is privately informed of the firm's potential and contracts with an agent to supply unobservable effort. We show it can be optimal for the firm to have loose monitoring in the sense that the monitoring system is less perfect than what is...

The discussion on value-based performance measures is centered around the concept of residual income. The main property of residual income is its connection to capital budgeting and the net-present-value-rule. This property is, however, not sufficient to guarantee strong goal congruence between...

Empirical studies report a gap between theoretical concepts of management accounting and the actual practice in organizations. Specifically, there is a virtual absence of literature on the individual factors that drive or hinder the adoption of sophisticated management accounting concepts. In...

We consider a single-principal/multi-agent model to investigate the principal's preferences over delegated contracting. The analysis extends the single-agent/multi-task LEN model in Feltham and Xie (1994) to a multi-agent/multi-task context. We consider full-commitment contracts, i.e., the...