دانلود رایگان مقاله سیستم های حسابداری و ضوابط به عنوان منبع مزیت رقابتی پایدار

Abstract

This study examines whether using customer accounting systems for resource allocation purposes is a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Based on a longitudinal data set comparing the performance of firms that adopt customer accounting and their industry benchmarks, we find that financial performance increases post adoption, leading to significant abnormal positive performance vis-à-vis average industry benchmarks (4–5%-points ROA difference) in the first two years following the adoption. However, we also show that this effect deteriorates over time, suggesting that the adoption of management accounting systems is a source of temporary rather than sustainable competitive advantage. The results are robust to other strategic events around the time of adoption, different matching of peers, and the influence of other factors that could be expected to influence firm performance. We discuss the implications of these findings for management accounting research and practice.

5. Discussion and conclusions

This paper investigates whether any competitive advantage offered by adopting Customer Accounting systems for resource allocation purposes will stand the test of time. The results of our event study, robustness tests and additional analyses suggest that management accounting innovations are a source of temporary rather than sustainable competitive advantage. Hence, although we find evidence in favor of a performance effect of implementing CA systems for resource allocation purposes, echoing prior event studies of management accounting techniques such as Activity-based costing and The Balanced Scorecard (Crabtree & DeBusk, 2008; Kennedy & Affleck-Graves, 2001), our results and robustness tests also imply that adopting firms are unable to sustain this initial above-industry performance over the longer term. CA systems appear to be particularly performance enhancing in the first two years following CA adoption (above-industry ROA of 4–5%-points), after which the abnormal positive performance differential vis-à-vis industry benchmarks diminishes and CA adopters' financial performance reverts to general industry levels. Moreover, our results indicate that CA adopters' performance improves even in times when mean performance of industry peers declines.