Rethinking Decision Usefulness

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Williams, Paul F.; Ravenscroft, Sue P.
• 署名单位: North Carolina State University; University of Strathclyde; Iowa State University
• 刊物名称: CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTING RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0823-9150
• DOI: 10.1111/1911-3846.12083
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 763-+
• 关键词: conceptual-framework; rationality; ECONOMICS; reality; ETHICS

摘要

Decision usefulness has served as the stated rationale for selecting accounting standards for over 40 years. Its authority, however, was not gained through explicit theory development or argumentation, but was instead born full grown (Staubus 1999, 163) as a conceptual takeover in the dead of night (338). The lack of an extended period of argumentation and debate meant decision usefulness's conceptual weaknesses were remarked upon but allowed to remain unresolved. We evaluate whether decision usefulness has served accounting well and conclude that it has not. We discuss the role that a criterion such as decision usefulness must play to validly justify standard setters' choices. We then briefly outline the emergence of decision usefulness and summarize academic and professional responses to its rapid emergence and usurpation of earlier, allegedly normative theories. To rely on decision usefulness requires assumptions about individual motivation and cognition, and about the predictability of market behavior. Relying on recent research on individual human motivation and decision making and on the nature of markets, we demonstrate that decision usefulness lacks the essential property that allows standard setters to rely on it at either the micro (individual decision-maker) level or the macro (economy-wide) level to justify the standards they issue. We conclude that as a rationale for regulation of financial reporting decision usefulness is incoherent and we argue for a reconsideration of accountability for understanding accounting and for making accounting policy.