Reviews the book "Implementing Activity-Based Cost Management: Moving From Analysis to Action," by Robin Cooper, Robert S. Kaplan, Lawrence S. Maisel, Eileen Morrissey and Ronald N. Oehn.
This research examines the effect that adoption of earnings-based incentive plans has on performance and capital expenditure policy in the motor carrier industry. The motor carrier industry provides the opportunity to study the effect of incentive plans on small, closely-held organizations. Restricting the sample to a single industry controls for variations in accounting procedures, heterogeneous production functions, and other environmental factors. Firms that adopted bonus and performance plans are matched with similar firms without such plans. The matching criteria are size, carrier type, and freight classification. The dependent variables are operating ratio, net income, capital expenditures, and maintenance expenditures. The analysis investigates the extent to which the groups differ in performance and investment policy before and after plan adoption. The results indicate that motor carriers that adopted bonus plans had out-performed the respective control firms during the post-adoptive period. This relatively improved performance is not linked to reductions in capital or maintenance expenditures. Although the results for performance plan adopters are in the expected directions, they are not statistically significant.
Comments on a suggested alternative method based on the distributed lag form of adaptive expectations for estimating the parameters of the partial adjustment and adoptive expectations model. Potential problems of the alternative estimation procedure; Overview of the estimates of parameters by the suggested iterative ordinary least squares method; Findings of the regression model for the partial adjustment coefficient estimates.