Research for Accounting Policy: An Overview.

Abstract This article focuses on conventional and modern accounting researches devoted to questions of accounting policy. The purpose of this article is to offer a model for organizing one's thoughts and efforts directed toward the process of accounting policy making and related research strategies. The motivation for attempting such a task is a conviction that results from individual accounting research studies must, suggestively, be interpreted as interrelated building blocks for accounting policy decisions. The authors consider accounting policy making, at first, as a social choice process. They argue that the most promising use of any given research strategy in the area of financial reporting policy is not in selecting optimal alternatives; rather, it is in contributing, along with all other available strategies, to developing theories that then may be used by policy makers to settle specific issues. The statements of goals of financial accounting made to date suffer from two major problems: first, that they have not received general acceptance and second, that they do not provide a basis for selecting among alternative policies. The framework of a standard accounting policy decisions is proposed here having a prime goal for maximization of social welfare.