A dynamic view of management accounting systems

Organizations invest significant amounts of time and money in management accounting systems, such as internal reporting systems, controls, and performance measurement systems. This dissertation presents three studies that use a laboratory experiment to examine how different users adjust and change how they use management accounting systems. The first study (chapter 2) examines how principals adjust their control over agents when the economic costs of controlling agents change. The second study (chapter 3) investigates how the prospect of rotating to another business unit impacts managers’ contemporary reports about operational distortions in performance measurement systems. The third study (chapter 4) examines how managers’ reporting decisions evolve in more complex, hierarchical systems, and whether they, next to transferring information, also communicate an intention to exhibit more cooperative behavior in the future.