Organizational Design and Management Accounting Change

Changing management accounting systems requires more than appropriate implementation.It is argued that structural characteristics of an organization, centralization in particular, should also be taken into account when deciding on a change.Centralization implies higher costs of communication because the decision-maker has to obtain information from organizational participants who have incentives to inffluence the decision.A limit on communication reduces inffluence costs but at the same time it also lowers the quality of the decision.As a result of that, centralized organizations (i) will implement changes in their accounting systems less often than decentralized ones (ii) will more often implement top-down, i.e. ignore local information.organizational design;management accounting change;centralization;influence costs

Book Review

Reviewing Agent\u27s and Buyer\u27s Guide: the Survey Handbook, National Underwriter Company, 195

Rasm: Compiling Racket to WebAssembly

WebAssembly is an instruction set designed for a stack based virtual machine, with an emphasis on speed, portability and security. As the use cases for WebAssembly grow, so does the desire to target WebAssembly in compilation. In this thesis we present Rasm, a Racket to WebAssembly compiler that compiles a select subset of the top forms of the Racket programming language to WebAssembly. We also present our early findings in our work towards adding a WebAssembly backend to the Chez Scheme compiler that is the backend of Racket. We address initial concerns and roadblocks in adopting a WebAssembly backend and propose potential solutions and patterns to address these concerns. Our work is the first serious effort to compile Racket to WebAssembly, and we believe it will serve as a good aid in future efforts of compiling high-level languages to WebAssembly

Book Review

Reviewing Alpheus Thomas Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law, The Viking Press, 195

The Effectiveness of Caps on Political Lobbying

In this paper, we analyze a lobby game, modelled as an all-pay auction in which interest groups submit bids in order to obtain a political prize.The bids are restricted to be below a cap imposed by the government.For both an incomplete and a complete information setting we show the following results. While ex post a lower cap may lead to higher lobbying expenditures, ex ante a lower cap always implies lower expected total lobbying expenditures.The incompletely informed government maximizes social welfare by implementing a cap equal to zero.lobbying;auctions;game theory