The effects of target difficulty and relative ability on managers’ delegation decisions

Managers often need to choose between handling a task themselves and delegating it to a subordinate. We examine how the difficulty of the performance target set for the task affects such choices. We theorize that while managers tend to delegate more when the subordinate has a higher ability to handle the task, they will also use delegation to influence the perceived responsibility for the task outcome. Accordingly, we hypothesize that managers will tend to delegate tasks with difficult targets to avoid potential blame and hold on to tasks with easy targets to claim potential credit, and that the former tendency will be stronger than the latter. Using an experiment, we find evidence consistent with the predicted effect of target difficulty, but not the hypothesized asymmetry. A supplemental experiment with a slightly modified design confirms the results of our main experiment and also provides evidence of the hypothesized interaction. In addition, our results show that difficult targets can lead to “over-delegation” and easy targets can lead to “under-delegation”, potentially destroying firm value.</p

De controller als choice architect

Management accountants are choice architects: they provide information that is used in managerial decision making and they have considerable influence on the monetary and non-monetary incentives that drive managers’ decision-making processes. Over the past two decades, our know - ledge of how people make economic decisions has increased tremendously. However, this has had only very little impact on the design of management accounting and control systems in organizations. Consequently, management accounting is (again) at risk of becoming irrelevant. To secure its relevance, management accountants need to become aware of their role as choice architects and need to develop into professionals whose core competence is to provide insight into quantitative information as a product of human decision making and, vice versa, to explain and predict decision-making behavior as a response to quantitative information. Academic management accounting research should facilitate this development. How this can be done is illustrated using three examples of practically relevant research areas: subjective performance evaluation, internal transparency and the design of the control function in organizations

Two symptoms strongly suggest benign paroxysmal positional vertigo in a dizzy patient

Introduction: This prospective cohort study determined which questions in patient history are most likely to identify symptoms that are independently associated with a diagnosis of benign paroxysmal positional dizziness (BPPV) in patients presenting with dizziness, and to evaluate whether the patient's age and type of BPPV are of influence.Methods: We included adult patients with dizziness referred to our dizziness center, Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, from December 2018 to November 2019. All patients completed a questionnaire, underwent vestibular testing and received a diagnosis. Symptoms strongly suggesting BPPV were tested with multivariable analysis to determine their independent associations with BPPV. Subgroup analysis was performed for patient age, and the type of BPPV.Results: We included a total of 885 patients, 113 of whom (13%) were diagnosed with BPPV. The duration of dizziness spells <1 min (Q2) and dizziness provoked by rolling over in bed (Q4) were independently associated with the diagnosis BPPV. Q2 showed a sensitivity of 43%, and a specificity of 75%; Q4 scored 81% and 68%, respectively. Overall, the way patients perceived their dizziness (vertigo, light-headedness or instability) was not independently associated with the diagnosis BPPV. In younger patients, light-headedness and instability decreased the likelihood of BPPV compared to vertigo.Conclusion: The most reliable predictors for BPPV in patient history are a short duration of the dizziness spell and provocation of dizziness by rolling over in bed. Unlike younger patients, elderly patients with BPPV do not only perceive the dizziness as vertigo, but also as a feeling of instability.Disorders of the head and nec

Study of doubly strange systems using stored antiprotons

Bound nuclear systems with two units of strangeness are still poorly known despite their importance for many strong interaction phenomena. Stored antiprotons beams in the GeV range represent an unparalleled factory for various hyperon-antihyperon pairs. Their outstanding large production probability in antiproton collisions will open the floodgates for a series of new studies of systems which contain two or even more units of strangeness at the P‾ANDA experiment at FAIR. For the first time, high resolution γ-spectroscopy of doubly strange ΛΛ-hypernuclei will be performed, thus complementing measurements of ground state decays of ΛΛ-hypernuclei at J-PARC or possible decays of particle unstable hypernuclei in heavy ion reactions. High resolution spectroscopy of multistrange Ξ−-atoms will be feasible and even the production of Ω−-atoms will be within reach. The latter might open the door to the |S|=3 world in strangeness nuclear physics, by the study of the hadronic Ω−-nucleus interaction. For the first time it will be possible to study the behavior of Ξ‾+ in nuclear systems under well controlled conditions

De kredietcrisis en de rol van de controller

De kredietcrisis roept vele vragen op ten aanzien van de rol en de verantwoordelijkheden van controllers. In dit artikel ga ik in op twee van die vragen. Eerst sta ik stil bij de vraag welke rol controllers hebben gespeeld bij het ontstaan van de crisis. Daarna behandel ik de vraag of de crisis van invloed zal zijn op de verantwoordelijkheden en werkzaamheden van controllers in de toekomst. Het centrale thema van dit artikel is dat de kredietcrisis in belangrijke mate is veroorzaakt door verkeerde vormen van prestatiebeloning en dat de controller zich moet ontwikkelen tot een specialist op het gebied vande relatie tussen informatie en incentives. Ook zal ik betogen dat organisaties er goed aan doen hun controllers meer machtsmiddelen te geven om in te grijpen wanneer managers de fout in gaan