In Defense of Limited Manufacturing Cost Control: Disciplining Acquisition of Private Information by Suppliers

By Anil Arya, Brian Mittendorf, Ram Ramanan
The Accounting Review | January 2022

DOI

doi.org/10.2308/TAR-2018-0694

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Citation

Arya, Anil., Mittendorf, Brian., Ramanan, Ram. In Defense of Limited Manufacturing Cost Control: Disciplining Acquisition of Private Information by Suppliers The Accounting Review doi.org/10.2308/TAR-2018-0694.

The Accounting Review, 2022

Abstract

When a firm's input supplier can acquire and misreport private information to gain an edge in negotiations, we show that the firm can blunt the supplier's informational advantage by permitting inefficiencies in its own internal production. Specifically, we establish that a modest increase in the cost of the input(s) a firm makes internally credibly commits it to be more aggressive in negotiations with a supplier for the input(s) the firm buys. Recognizing that its potential information rents will be limited, the supplier, in turn, becomes less aggressive in information acquisition. The paper fully characterizes the equilibrium—the firm's investments, the supplier's information acquisition and reporting decisions, and the terms of trade—to demonstrate that often-maligned internal bloat can be an endogenous facilitator of efficient outsourcing.

Ram Ramanan is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Before joining ISB, he served as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis and at SUNY, Binghamton.

Professor Ramanan’s research focuses on the role of accounting in management decisions. Specifically, he examines the incentive effects of financial reports and disclosures on various managerial decisions both inside an organisation and within supply chains. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Review of Accounting Studies, Contemporary Accounting Research, Management Science, and Production and Operations Management.

At ISB Professor Ramanan teaches the core Managerial Accounting course and the elective in Strategic Performance Management.

Professor Ramanan holds a PhD in Accounting from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He is also a Chartered Accountant.

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