Hi everyone! Do you have any idea, about what I could do my thesis? I´m studying economics in Finland to become an accountant/auditor and I´m looking for a intresting topic for my thesis. Is there anything related to accounting that I could write about within the Austrian School of Economics?
Sincerely,
Patrick Lindman
Patrick,
Look at http://mises.org/etexts/Mises_Research_Ideas.pdf. It have over 20 pages of ideas. Good luck.
Patrick
Here is a thought. Hayek wrote “The use of knowledge in Society” about how information is used across all levels of society, continuously, and in infinitesimally small increments.
Companies are one part of society. Small ones tend to be very much under the control of the owner, and larger ones tend to be very top down driven. But in today’s society, with so much information available it may be hard to justify this model. Indeed, to gain a competitive advantage, one may need to delegate responsibilty down to the field, but still have a means of accounting control.
For example, I know of two large competing computer companies, one of which delegates gross profit responsibility to the field sales managers, and the other requires all deviations from list price to be approved by the Vice President. In the first case, one has to ensure that fraud, recklessness, or plain bad management do not damage the reputation and financial viability of the company. In the second, considering that there are 100+ transaction per day, the Vice President probably spends little more each day than approving transactions he has little real knowledge of.
With kind regards
Remnant.
Patrick
I forget to mention in my previous post that such an approach of delegating down responsibility along the lines of “The use of Knowledge in Society” would also require a look at Business Intelligence for the masses, a distributed but aggregating management system, the ability to choose or reject in-house service functions for cheaper ones on the market.
With kind regards
Remnant.