A major objective of this study is to examine the effects of group maturity (GM) and organizational capabilities (OC) on performance of Target Cost Management (TCM) systems. Two hypothesis were formulated and tested: (1) TCM performance results will depend on the group maturity (2) The relationship between the organizational capabilities and performance results will depend on the group maturity. Results from the study provide partial support for relationship between organizational capabilities and performance. The results also show that differences in performance of organizations grouped by degree of group maturity could be found.

Despite its impact on the management of a firm, the project risk profile of the capital investment has not been necessarily much studied. In this context, the motivation of this paper is to quantify the project risk profile, starting from the judgmental forecast of sales, building the statistic distribution of the value of the project and deriving the risk parameters; standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis. Our contributions are not only to clarify the measurement method of the project risk, but to discuss the effect of the risk parameters on the decision making of capital investment with the consideration of the risk control.

This paper presents the results of 16 experimental markets designed to test the theoretical model which states that, when disclosures are credible and costless, full disclosure of private information will be induced so as not to be interpreted as having the worst news. This experiment conducted two manipulations, and produced a 2x2 factorial cell design. The manipulations focused on (1) the number of realization values and (2) the presence/absence of an antifraud rule. The former manipulation was due to our questions about prior experimental studies. The latter was due to our interest in an antifraud rule posited as a critical condition in the models. The cells with an antifraud rule also were set up as the benchmark for those without an antifraud rule. Our results generally support the theoretical hypotheses and behavioral forecasts, and provide some interesting findings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between managerial myopic research and development (R & D) investment behavior and corporate governance structure in Japanese firms. I find that: (1) debt ratio is positively associated with the possibility of managerial myopic R & D investment behavior, (2) stable stockholders ownership tend to prevent managers from cutting R & D investment in order to meet target earnings. But the relationship between managerial myopic R & D investment behavior and corporate governance structure are changed in recent years.

This paper investigates a feature of administered transfer pricing in a decentralized firm with headquarters and two divisions. The upstream division manufactures intermediate products and ships them to the downstream division, which uses them as inputs in its production process and ultimately sells final products externally. Before production and exchange of the intermediate products take place, the upstream division undertakes cost-reducing investments. Under these circumstances, we show that the optimal transfer price exceeds the marginal cost of the intermediate products when upstream division's investment reduces the downstream division's cost of the products. This result is consistent with survey evidence on the transfer pricing practices of firms.