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The Accounting Review Vol. 90 No. 4 2015

On the Stewardship Value of Soft Managerial Reports

Florin Şabac1; Jie Tian2

1 University of Alberta · 2 University of Waterloo

Abstract

We characterize the necessary and sufficient conditions for communication of private, unverifiable managerial information to be valuable for stewardship purposes. First, the hard, verifiable information must be able to confirm to some extent the truthfulness of the manager's soft, unverifiable report. Second, neither the hard, verifiable information nor the soft, unverifiable managerial report should be too informative for providing effort incentives because that makes it harder to motivate truthful reports from the manager. In particular, this conflict can be sufficiently severe that eliciting reports from the manager has no value.

DOI
10.2308/accr-50946
Volume
90
Issue
4
Pages
1683-1706
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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