A Field Study of Control System “Redesign”: The Impact of Institutional Processes on Strategic Choice*

Abstract. This paper studies the role of an organization's accounting control system (ACS) as part of an interrelated control “package,” in which other control systems function either as substitutes or complements. Drawing on resource dependence and institutional theories, it argues that this control mix is not only contingent on the organization's technical environment but also on its institutional environment. In addition, the paper draws on empirical evidence to demonstrate how the design of the “package” is actively shaped by the strategic choices of its dominant coalition. The empirics are based on a longitudinal field study of one large, public teaching hospital in Australia that underwent material changes in its governance structure, culture, and accounting control system. Résumé. Les auteurs étudient le rôle du système de contôle comptable d'une organisation, à titre d'élément d'une « famille » de systèmes de contrôle reliés entre eux à l'intérieur de Iaquelle les autres systèmes de contrôle jouent le rôle de substituts ou de compléments. S'inspirant de la théorie de la dépendance des ressources et de la théorie institutionnelle, ils affirment que cette combinaison de systèmes n'est pas seulement tributaire de l'environnement technique de l'organisation, mais de son environnement institutionnel. Ils se fondent, en outre, sur des constatations empiriques pour démontrer comment la structure de la « famille » de systèmes est activement façonnée par les choix stratégiques du groupe dominant. Les données empiriques proviennent d'une étude longitudinale sur le terrain, menée auprès d'un important hôpital public universitaire australien dont la structure de régie, la culture et le système de contrôle comptable ont connu des transformations majeures.     

Measuring the Performance Drivers of a Pilot Implementation of a Purchasing Card System

Corporate purchasing cards have been offered as an efficient means of maintaining control over purchasing while reducing the administrative cost associated with the acquisition of low-dollar items. However, despite its growing popularity, there has been little systematic research on the use of this technology. This study uses archival data and a survey of users from a single large organisation to describe the nature of purchasing card technology and to investigate the consequences of its implementation. The card was found to be more positively accepted by younger, more committed employees who had shorter periods of tenure at the organisation studied, but who had received higher levels of supervisory encouragement, and who had more experience with credit cards.     

FEN(FAR EAST NETWORK)大友良英+颜峻+袁志伟+柳汉古

前言音景SOUNDSCAPE 2008年8月,在新加坡艺术家蒋才雄(Cheo Chaihiang)写给中国艺术家蒋志的书信中,他并不偶然的提到他的另位朋友Lee Tong Soon,一名京剧专家的一篇论文《音乐,社会和亚洲音景》(Music,Society and The Asian Soundscape)中的观点"音乐如何     

国际策展经验与亚洲当代艺术:CIGE2009论坛

Sook-Kyung Lee泰特利物浦美术馆每两年举办一次利物浦双年展,我们的顾问有来自包括台北等亚洲其他地区的策展人,正因为有了这些身份多元的策展人的参与,使得我们能够在展览当中充分地体现出不同地区的一些作品。     

WHY REWARDS ARE BETTER THAN SANCTIONS

Sanctions are said to fail because of the “rally‐round‐the‐flag effect”. This is the main reason why many advocate the use of positive incentives as a viable alternative. Not only do rewards provoke no defensive reaction, but they may elicit a rally in support of compliance – a “fifth‐column effect.” Yet, positive incentives are vulnerable to extortion – doing wrong in the hope of obtaining larger rewards. As a result, many conjecture that sanction threats and promises of reward are most efficient when used simultaneously. We put this conjecture to a test, staging a formal confrontation of the two forms of incentives. Our model pits a sanctioner and a target in a game allowing for the possibility of rally‐round‐the‐flag, fifth‐column, and extortion effects. The game yields unambiguous results: under no circumstances should a sanctioner prefer sanction threats to reward promises. This result holds despite the risk of extortion, a risk that proves to be less of a drawback than the rally round the flag.     

The Best of Both Worlds: Accessing Emerging Economies via Developed Markets

A growing body of evidence suggests that the benefits of international diversification via developed markets have declined dramatically. While emerging markets still offer diversification opportunities, their public equity indices capture only a fraction of emerging countries' economic activity. We propose a diversification approach that exploits the global connectedness of developed countries to gain exposure to emerging countries' overall economies rather than their shallow equity markets. In doing so, we demonstrate that developed markets still offer substantial diversification benefits beyond those available through equity indices. Our results suggest that relying on equity indices to assess diversification benefits understates diversification gains.     

Underreaction to Industry‐Wide Earnings and the Post‐Forecast Revision Drift

We test whether the post‐forecast revision drift is mainly attributable to investors’ underreaction to industry‐wide earnings news conveyed by analysts’ forecast revisions. We find a large drift associated with industry‐wide earnings news but no drift associated with firm‐specific earnings news. Consistent with the functional fixation hypothesis, we provide evidence that the post‐forecast revision drift is driven by investors’ underreaction to the higher persistence of industry‐wide earnings. Although prior research has focused on differential persistence of earnings components stemming from managerial reporting discretion, we provide evidence suggesting that investors do not fully understand the differential earnings persistence attributable to industry fundamentals.     

ORDER PROCESSING COST REDUCTION IN A JOINT VENDOR-BUYER INVENTORY SYSTEM VIA THE APPLICATION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Modem information technologies have become important means for manufacturing and retailing firms to gain such competitive advantages as lower logistics costs and securer customers' loyalty. In this paper, we investigate a joint inventory system where the vendor produces a single item for its sole buyer and the buyer sells the item to consumers with backorders allowed. Each production lot is delivered to the buyer in a number of shipments and consecutive shipments will be increased by a fixed factor. Both vendor and buyer are willing to participate in order processing time reduction by applying information technologies in order to decrease their joint total cost. The order processing time can be reduced by certain expenditures and will affect the lot-size decisions. An analytical model is developed for determining the optimal expenditure in order processing time reduction and lot sizes for both vendor and buyer. The numerical experiment along with sensitivity analysis is also performed to obtain some insights of our model.     

Social Inefficiency of Free Entry with Status Effects

Free markets may support too many or too few firms. Traditional analysis does not provide unambiguous conclusion in this respect. This paper introduces status effects of consumption into the model. It shows that a sufficiently significant status effect tends to support too many firms. Two conditions are required for this result. First, complementary effect between status and consumption is not significant. Second, a higher average status consumption level makes everyone more difficult to get the same degree of gain in status. Both conditions appear to be realistic.     

AFFECTING FACTORS ON RISK-ADJUSTED EFFICIENCY IN TAIWAN'S BANKING INDUSTRY

This study adopts a two-stage approach, data envelopment analysis (DEA) and tobit regression, to investigate the bank efficiency index and efficiency effect incorporated into account credit and market risk. The authors use the DEA method in the first stage to estimate bank cost efficiency, and the tobit regression model in the second stage to estimate efficiency effects. The empirical results are summarized as follows: First, results indicate that risk factors impact bank efficiency. Banks with a higher degree of nonperforming loans or value at risk will see efficiency decrease by incorporating account risk. Second, there is no significant difference with the bank efficiency index taking only credit risk or market risk into consideration, but there are significant differences on the bank efficiency index in situations without risk or with credit and/or market risks. Finally, the study notes that different bank efficiency indexes calculated according to different risks are affected by different factors. (JEL G1, G21 )