This article focuses on accounting for guaranteed wage plans. Most of the wage leveling plans are basically employee withholding plans whereby some of the earnings of the employee are withheld and are paid to him later when his earnings are low. The obvious disadvantage of this plan lies in the employee's reluctance to having part of his earnings withheld. The majority of wage leveling plans have therefore created little employee enthusiasm, for they are little more than savings plans, supervised by the company. A major difference between the leveling and the minimum-guarantee type of plan is the number of employees that are covered. Where the wage process is primarily one of leveling wages, there is no excessive cost to the employer for time not worked. One of the most complex accounting problems arising out of recent developments in guaranteed wage payments is concerned with the special exemptions allowed for the payment of overtime premiums under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The record-keeping process is further complicated if the company is to take advantage of the overtime premium relief provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

An efficient intracompany pricing system should establish a price that: 1. Fosters a healthy interdepartmental competitive spirit. 2. Provides an adequate profit yard-stick for the measurement of departmental management. 3. Provides figures to top management for use in policy decisions to make or to subcontract. 4. In some cases minimizes federal income taxes. The four methods available are: (a) Price established by top management. (b) Cost, cost plus fixed percentage, and standard cost methods. (c) The retail price offered to the producing division's other customers. (d) Interdepartmental bargained price method. Ideally the standard cost method would appear to afford the best answer to the four basic requirements. Certainly a company already using standard costs would find little in the other available methods to warrant their use. In the absence of an adequate standard cost system, the bar-gained price method has much to recommend it particularly if a list price with class discounts is used to offset long and tedious negotiations.

possess negative real parts. The answer to this question given by James and Belz in [4] is not very useful from a practical point of view for it amounts essentially to the determination of the roots of the characteristic equation themselves. A stability criterion using only the given coefficients and not the roots of the characteristic equation was given by Hayes in [3]. But here, too, the transcendental auxiliary equation x* cot x = c must be solved first. In this paper we present another proof of the stability criterion using the so-called graphical methods of control engineering, i.e., Cauchy's theorem of residues. We thereby arrive at an expression for the criterion which seems to be better adapted to practical purposes (because with given coefficients only the auxiliary equation cos x = c has to be solved). The connection with the other forms of the stability criterion will be clarified and the criterion will be illustrated by an example from economics. For general discussion of these problems and further economics examples, compare Tustin [6].