For the first in-person WHU Research Seminar organized by the Institute of Management Accounting and Control (IMC) since the start of the pandemic, we were excited to welcome Katlijn Haesebrouck from Maastricht University.
Can effortful information acquisition lead to more honest reporting? And how can we motivate managers to engage in more effortful information acquisition? Katlijn and her co-authors Jongwoon (Willie) Choi and Tyler Thomas (both University of Wisconsin-Madison) conducted two experiments to answer these questions. They find effortful information acquisition leads to less misreporting when managers have discretion, but this is less so the case when managers do not have discretion. They further show managers’ sense of responsibility plays an important role in their information acquisition and reporting decisions. In their second experiment, they compare the effects of controls targeting either the information acquisition decision (input control), the subsequent reporting decision (output control), or both (hybrid control). Interestingly, they find all three controls can help motivate managers with discretion to acquire information more often, which leads to less misreporting.
Before the seminar, Katlijn also gave valuable feedback to the doctoral students at the IMC on their research.
Katlijn Haesebrouck is an assistant professor of accounting at Maastricht University. She obtained her Ph.D. from KU Leuven (Belgium). Her main area of expertise is managerial accounting and control based on the experimental method.