Reviews the book "Activity Costing for Decisions," by George J. Staubus.

This article focuses on an article written by Bikki Jaggi and Hon-Shiang Lau, published in an earlier issue of the journal "The Accounting Review," as of April 1975. Jaggi and Lau had evaluated human resource valuation models and presented a new model based on the actuarial concept of homogeneous group and Markov analysis. The purpose of this article is to review briefly Jaggi and Lau's model and to suggest an alternative formulation of it that requires fewer calculations while avoiding the issue of materiality. The objective of Jaggi and Lau's model is to determine the economic value of the services that will be rendered an organization by its current employees. To accomplish this objective the model incorporates data on the historical movement of groups of employees within an organization into a rank transitional matrix and uses this matrix to predict the career movements of similar groups currently within the organization. The value of the services an organization's current employees render in a future period is computed by multiplying the model-determined estimate of the number of current employees that will be in each service rank in that period by the value of the services an employee in each rank renders the organization.

Reviews the book "The Capital Budgeting Decision," 4th ed., by Harold J. Bierman and Seymour Smidt.

This article presents information on a conceptual framework for linking some seemingly diverse approaches to human resource accounting. Human resource accounting has two components, human asset accounting and human capital accounting. Human asset accounting is concerned with determining the value of the human resources employed in an organization to the organization. Human capital accounting is concerned with determining the value of the human resources employed in an organization to the employees of that organization. The total value of the human resources employed in an organization is equal to the value of the organization's human assets and its employee's human capital. Under the proprietary and entity theories of the firm, accountants are primarily interested in determining the value of human assets to an organization. However, they must recognize that changes in human capital values affect human asset values. If the enterprise theory of the firm were adopted, accountants would also be directly interested in determining the total value of the human resources employed in an organization and the value of the employee's interest in these resources.

The article reports that when the production costs of a product follow the learning curve phenomenon the ratio of actual production costs to units produced declines over the product's life cycle. The production process has two joint products, one physical and the other intangible. The physical product is the unit being produced for sale. The intangible product is the ability to produce additional units with a lower expenditure of time and materials. This intangible asset is a firm-specific, job-specific asset. It is of value because it can reduce subsequent production costs. The value of the intangible asset increases rapidly at first as the organization quickly acquires "know how." As production becomes more efficient the rate of investment in this intangible asset declines until little or no additional investment takes place. Finally, as the product's life cycle nears its end the intangible asset loses value as the potential cost savings from its use declines. Current accounting procedures do not give recognition to this intangible asset.

Reviews the book `TQC for Accounting: A New Role in Companywide Improvement,' by Takashi Kanatsu.

Reviews the book "Readings in Cost Accounting, Budgeting, and Control," 6th ed., edited by William E. Thomas.