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This paper aims to provide a discussion of the application of the research pitch template developed by Faff (2015, 2016b) to a research topic on whistle-blowing. Specifically, the template was used to develop a research proposal that investigates whether government administered financial rewards undermine a firm’s internal whistle-blowing system. This letter provides a brief commentary on using the pitch template and then discusses personal reflections on the pitch exercise.

This paper applies the template of Faff (2015) and provides a narrative of the pitching exercise.

As a first-time user of Faff’s (2015) pitching template, I have found the template very helpful in articulating the essence of this research project and mapping out the fundamentals for the project.

This is a new research idea that is not a pitch retrofitted from published papers or theses. The pitch template was used for the purposes of developing and refining the research idea.

While investment decisions may be financial decisions, there is a growing recognition that they are also often non-financially based decisions. The purpose of this study is to report findings focused on the project selection stage of capital budgeting, which has the objectives of exploring for: the relative degree of emphasis decision makers attach to a financial and non-financial orientation in capital budgeting; and the role, if any, that two agency theory variables have on the relative degree of emphasis: a personal incentive for project go-ahead and monitoring of project outcomes through a post-audit.

Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) are used and framed in a between-subjects 2 (personal incentive) × 2 (monitoring) design. DCEs are well-suited to research questions which examine some tension between competing alternatives. For example, trade-offs involving the relative degree of emphasis decision makers attach to a financial and non-financial orientation in capital budgeting.

In the absence of a personal incentive and monitoring, decision makers attach a significant degree of emphasis to cash inflows and cash outflows, both financial factors, and one strategic non-financial factor being improvement in the position of the firm vis-à-vis competitors in capital budgeting. However, when decision makers receive a personal incentive from project go-ahead, they attach a lower degree of emphasis to cash outflows. Alternatively, when there is monitoring through a post-audit and a personal incentive, decision makers attach a higher degree of emphasis to cash outflows.

Decision makers attach a significant degree of emphasis to only a relatively narrow band of attributes in making a capital budgeting decision, which is true in both the absence of and in the presence of the agency conditions. There is also little support for the view that there is any higher degree of emphasis attached to a financial orientation vis-à-vis a non-financial orientation. A particularly important finding relates to the overarching goal of monitoring through a post-audit. One view is that it should foster more accurate forecasting by making forecasters aware that their efforts will be reviewed. However, the findings of this study appear to be more supportive of a view that post-audits might lead agents to become more conservative or even shy away from projects.

The study makes contributions to the growing field of research which has the objective of exploring for the relative degree of emphasis decision makers attach to a financial and non-financial orientation in capital budgeting. In particular, it extends the prior research through its investigation of the role that two agency theory variables play in the relative degree of emphasis decision makers attach to a financial and non-financial orientation: a personal incentive for project go-ahead and monitoring of project outcomes through a post-audit.

This paper aims to introduce and illustrate how discrete choice experiments (DCEs) can be used by accounting researchers and present an agenda of accounting-related research topics that might usefully benefit from the adoption of DCEs.

Each major phase involved in conducting a DCE is illustrated using a capital budgeting case study. The research agenda is based on a review of experimental research in financial accounting, management accounting and auditing.

DCEs can overcome some of the problems associated with asking decision-makers to rank or rate alternatives. Instead, they ask decision-makers to choose an alternative from a set. DCEs arguably better reflect the realities of real-world decision-making because decision-makers need to make trade-offs between all of the alternatives relevant to a decision. An important advantage that DCEs offer is their ability to calculate willingness-to-pay estimates, which can enable the valuation of non-market goods. Several streams of experimental accounting research would appear well-suited to investigation with DCEs.

While every effort has been made to ensure that this illustration is as generic to as the many potential studies as possible, it may be that researchers seeking to utilise a DCE need to refer to additional literary sources. This study, however, should serve as a useful starting point.

Accounting researchers are expected to benefit from reading this article by being: made aware of the DCE method and its advantages; shown how to conduct a DCE; and provided with an agenda of accounting-related research topics that might usefully benefit from application of the DCE methodology.

It is the authors’ understanding that this is the first article directed to accounting academics regarding the conduct of DCEs for accounting research. It is hoped that this study can provide a useful platform for accounting academics to launch further research adopting DCEs.

This study examines how firms’ use of competitor-focused accounting information, specifically competitor monitoring information, impacts their pricing, demand, and overall revenue performance. The monitoring activities examined are the scope of monitoring, monitoring above and below one’s own hotel class (i.e., market segment), and the extent of reciprocity of monitoring. Competitor analysis is a central element in strategic management accounting (SMA), yet little empirical research has been done since companies do not disclose competitor monitoring activities. Proving the value of competitive monitoring provides strong support for SMA. Archival, proprietary monitoring information regarding pricing, demand, and revenue were obtained from one of the largest hotel markets in the United States. Using regression, we modeled the relationships between performance measures (pricing, demand, and revenue) and monitoring behaviors, while controlling for quality (hotel characteristics and management skill), competitive intensity, hotel class, geographic location, and ownership type. Our results indicate that two aspects of competitor monitoring impact hotel pricing that, in turn, impacts hotel demand and revenue performance. Specifically, a hotel monitoring more competitors (what we refer to as Scope) achieves higher prices with unchanged demand, resulting in higher revenue performance. Most hotels monitor within their class. However, deviating from one’s class has profound outcomes: looking at lower (higher) quality hotels results in a hotel setting lower (higher) prices, resulting in higher (unchanged) demand and lower (higher) revenue performance. Surprisingly, we did not find support for the reciprocity of monitoring. That is, whether the competitors monitored by a hotel, in turn follow the target, has no impact on hotel revenue performance outcomes. While the SMA literature notes the importance of competitor monitoring, this study fills a gap in an important, under-researched area by documenting the link between competitor monitoring behaviors and organizational revenue performance. This may help promote greater diffusion of SMA practices.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the differential motivations of hotel owners and operators to engage in earnings management through the selective capitalisation or expensing of asset related expenditures.

Research evidence has been collected via a mixed methods approach utilising 20 semi‐structured interviews with key hotel management contract stakeholders in Australia and a questionnaire survey administered to hotel general managers in Australia and New Zealand.

A review of the literature has resulted in an original distillation of 18 distinct earnings management motivations for hotel owners and operators. Qualitative data collected suggest an additional four motivations and that the primary motivation for hotel owners and operators to engage in earnings management stems from the two parties' desire to affect the size of the incentive management fee that is paid to hotel operators. A suggestion that operators have a greater tendency to seek to capitalise asset related expenditures, relative to owners, has been supported by both qualitative and quantitative data collected.

This study appears to be the first to have examined the manner in which an idiosyncratic aspect of hotel governance can result in competing earnings management motivations between hotel owners and operators; the first to pursue a broad level of abstraction with respect to examining earnings management in the context of asset related expenditure capitalisation decision making; the first to assess the relative strength of earnings management motivations concerning the capitalisation or expensing of asset related expenditure; and the first to conduct earnings management research utilising a mixed methods research approach involving the conducting of face‐to‐face interviews as well as administration of a questionnaire survey.

Not all pressured, greedy, and opportunistic individuals actually commit white-collar crime. So what exactly is the common denominator for individuals to commit white-collar crime? This study investigates the propensity of an individual to commit white-collar crime and advances personality as an explanatory factor. Questionnaire survey data is collected from 357 undergraduate accounting students in a later year accounting course at a large university in Australia. Personality is measured using the Big Five Inventory. Support is provided for the view that individuals scoring lower in agreeableness and lower in conscientiousness have a higher propensity to commit white-collar crime. While no significant main effect associations emerged for extraversion, neuroticism, or openness to experience, inspection of individual parameter estimates revealed a significant negative association between neuroticism and propensity to commit white-collar crime but only in certain circumstances.

In recent years professional accountancy bodies (e.g., CPA), accreditation institutions (e.g., AACSB) and employers have steadily raised, and continue to raise expectations regarding the need for accounting graduates to demonstrate skills in data analytics. One of the obstacles accounting instructors face in seeking to implement data analytics, however, is that they need access to ample teaching materials. Unfortunately, there are few such resources available for advanced programming languages such as R. While skills in commonly used applications such as Excel are no doubt needed, employers often take these for granted and incremental value is only added if graduates can demonstrate knowledge in using more advanced data analytics tools for decision-making such as coding in programming languages. This, together with the current dearth of resources available to accounting instructors to teach advanced programming languages is what drives motivation for this chapter. Specifically, we develop an intuitive, two-dimensional framework for incorporating R (a widely used open-source analytics tool with a powerful embedded programming language) into the accounting curriculum. Our model uses complexity as an integrating theme. We incorporate complexity into this framework at the dataset level (simple and complex datasets) and at the analytics task level (simple and complex tasks). We demonstrate two-dimensional framework by drawing on authentic simple and complex datasets as well as simple and complex tasks that could readily be incorporated into the accounting curriculum and ultimately add value to businesses. R script programming code are provided for all our illustrations.