Contributions published at Managerial Accounting (Robert Göx)

We study the optimal accounting policy of a financially constrained firm that pledges assets to raise debt capital for financing a risky project. The accounting system provides information about the value of the collateral. Absent accounting regulation, the optimal accounting system is conditionally conservative: it recognizes an impairment loss if the asset value is below a certain threshold, but never reports unrealized gains. We describe the optimal impairment rule and the optimal precision of the accounting information, and we provide comparative static results that lead to testable predictions on the determinants of impairment rules.

Im Zuge der Bankenkrise ist der Ruf nach einer schärferen Regulierung der Managergehälter laut geworden. Der Autor zeigt, dass staatliche Vorschriften in der Vergangenheit kaum je nützten und häufig unerwünschte Nebenwirkungen hatten. Erfolgversprechender wäre, den Aktionären mehr Kontrollrechte in Vergütungsfragen zu geben.

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 informativeness criterion proposed by Holmström (1979) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the optimality of a relative performance evaluation. Whenever the relative performance evaluation is positively related to the agent's reservation utility, the principal faces a trade-off between the benefits from improved risk sharing and the total cost of compensation. If the peer group effect is strong, it can be optimal to evaluate the agent on her own firm performance only. If the relative performance evaluation is negatively related to the agent's reservation utility, it can also prove useful to reward the agent on the basis of uninformative signals. We also study the optimal weighting and composition of the performance index and find that the principal puts lower (higher) weight on an index and on peer firms that are positively (negatively) related with agent's reservation utility. In case of a negative relation it can even be optimal to include firms with uncorrelated cash flows into the index in order to reduce the total compensation.

This paper analyzes the choice among alternative fixed and variable cost structures under demand uncertainty. We show that the standard decision rules for the choice among cost structures under certainty continue to hold if the decision maker is risk neutral. If the decision maker is risk averse, the optimal cost structure depends on the decision model. With cost-based decision making, the break even quantities are lower than under certainty. If the decision is based on contribution margins, the opposite holds. That is, a cost structure with higher fixed and lower variable cost becomes attractive for a lower (higher) quantity than under certainty if the decision maker is risk averse and makes his decision on the basis of cost (contribution margin). We also show that cost structures that are dominated under certainty can become attractive for a risk averse decision maker. Finally, we provide a simple agency model and show that the choice among different cost structures can not be separated from the optimal solution of the agency problem even if the principal is risk neutral. More generally, our results suggest that a simple comparison of cost functions is usually not sufficient for an optimal choice between cost structures under uncertainty.

This chapter reviews the recent economic literature on transfer pricing. As a starting point, we take Hirshleifer's transfer pricing model and discuss the basic structure of the most widely used model extensions. We review transfer pricing models with asymmetric information, transfer pricing models in incomplete contracting settings, strategic transfer pricing models, and international transfer pricing models with firms operating in different tax jurisdictions. The results offer a rich set of different explanations for the wide variety of transfer pricing methods in practice but they also show that it is impossible to give a general recommendation about “the” best transfer pricing method. By contrast, only limited progress has been made in arriving at a sufficient theory of decentralization. The models are either silent about organizational issues, or the advantages of decentralization are based on more or less restrictive informational assumptions. We conclude that the economic transfer pricing research has certainly improved the understanding of the relative usefulness of alternative transfer pricing methods for a carefully selected set of assumptions. Further theoretical and empirical research seems necessary for a better understanding of the economic reasons for decentralization and for explaining some unresolved empirical puzzles.

In this paper we analyze strategic transfer pricing with risk- and effort-averse divisional managers. In contrast to earlier literature, we find that the existence of a standard agency problem allows transfer pricing to serve as a commitment device even if the transfer prices are not mutually observable. The reason is that transfer prices are set above marginal cost to solve the agency problem and not for strategic purposes. Therefore, delegating the pricing authority to a risk-averse manager implies that he sets a higher product price than does the risk-neutral owner, because at the divisional level the transfer price represents the relevant unit cost for pricing. We show that the optimal scope of managerial authority generally depends on both the risk premium and the intensity of competition in the product market. We also identify conditions under which the delegation of pricing responsibilities to risk-averse managers constitutes a dominant strategy equilibrium.

This paper analyzes a capacity-planning and pricing problem of a monopolist facing uncertain demand. The model incorporates .soft. and .hard. capacity constraints (soft constraints can be relaxed at a cost while hard constraints cannot be relaxed) and demand uncertainty. The firm receives additional demand information within the planning horizon. The solution to the planning problem depends crucially on what is known about demand at the time of the capacity decision as well as the pricing decision. Historical acquisition costs of capacity are relevant for pricing whenever the same information is available for capacity planning and pricing. However, when the firm receives additional demand information before making the pricing decision, only marginal cost is relevant for pricing. Different types of capacity constraints, i.e., soft vs. hard, affect how much capacity the firm obtains, but not how the firm sets prices.