Bin Srinidhi

Tel: (973) 353 1017; Fax: (973) 353 1283
email: bsrinidhi@aol.com
URL: www.rutgers.edu/accounting/raw/gsm/srinidhi/binhome.htm

The following is a tentative outline of the course. As you might have inferred from grapevine, this course is not meant to cover all the areas of management accounting research. This course should provide you with some foundations for critically reading management accounting research papers. We will cover a few papers in depth.

In the past, I have required research term papers from each participant utilizing the concepts covered in the class. Generally, I have received these papers from one to two years after the course. In order to change this pattern, we will discuss and develop the papers from session 2 onwards. Hopefully, you can write these papers before the term is over.

The overall grade depends mostly on the term paper and on classroom discussion of the papers. Relevant and constructive comments in class which help understanding will be rewarded and irrelevant and frivolous comments which waste time will be penalized.

I plan to use Demskis Managerial Uses of Accounting Information, Kreps A Course in Microeconomic Theory and Rasmusens Games and Information in the first part of the course. The second part of the course will be discussion of papers.

Session 1: Classical Economic Foundations, Preferences and choices, Information sets and information definitions from (i) Demski, chapter 2, (ii) Kreps - chapters 1 and 2, (iii) Rasmusen - chapters 1 and 2

Session 2: Decision making under uncertainty from (i) Demski - chapter 4, (ii) Kreps - chapter 3

Session 3: Product Costing from Demski - chapters 5 & 6, Framing from Demski - chapters 11 & 12, Competitive response from Demski - chapter 16 and Performance evaluation from Demski - chapters 18 & 19

Session 4: Antle and Demski - The Controllability Principle in Responsibility Accounting, Accounting Review, Oct. 1988, Pages 700 - 718

Session 5 & 6: Asymmetric Information models from Rasmusen - chapters 6,7,8,9

Session 6 & 7: Holmstrom: Moral Hazard and Observability. The Bell Journal of Economics. Spring 1979. Pages 74-91

Session 8:Rogerson: The First Order Approach to Principal-Agent Problems. Econometrica. Nov. 1985. Pages 1357-1367.

Session 9:Christenson: Communication in Agencies. Bell Journal 1981. Pages 661 - 674

Session 10: Agency research in Managerial Accounting: A Second Look. by Stan Baiman, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 15, #4, pp. 341-371. 1990

Session 11: Nandakumar, Datar and Akella: Models for Measuring and Accounting for Cost of Conformance Quality. Management Science. Vol. 39, Jan. 1993 Pages 1-16

Session 12: Srinidhi and Sen, Effort Allocation Paper (still in process) or some other interesting paper.