Abstract To help reduce myopia, modern management accounting incorporates, as a significant element, non-financial measures of performance designed to reflect activities not fully captured by "earnings." Not much evidence, however, has yet been accumulated about conditions under which alternative designs perform well. This paper introduces a model that is well suited for providing new insights into the incentive use of alternative, observed measurement designs, such as ratios. In the context of a simple example, two alternative measurement designs intended to help focus management's attention to customer satisfaction and, thus, reduce myopic behavior are studied and conditions under which one or the other is preferable are identified.
Thomas Hemmer (Sun,) studied this question.