Extract

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1.   Introduction

1.1   Motivation

Many different activities are necessary for the proper functioning of any organization, but one of them is essential: performance evaluation.2 Performance evaluation provides valuable information for decision facilitating and decision influencing, as it reveals the degree of success of the organization and has consequences on motivation, fairness perception and organizational behaviors.3 For this reason, it is one of the central topics in management accounting research, which has the goal of identifying and developing the most appropriate management techniques for each circumstance.4

Performance evaluation has been influenced by the paradigm of the homo oeconomicus, who is defined as a self-interested and optimizer (i.e., value-maximizer) agent. Yet these assumptions have been shown to be inadequate for describing real human behavior. As a consequence, future-oriented research in management accounting and control has been called to accept the idea of a decision maker with limited capacity and a non-optimizing behavior.5 This requires, in the first place, a thorough analysis of existing and emerging management control techniques in order to understand how managers use them and to which extent these methods contribute to decision facilitation. In a second step, existing instruments may be improved or adapted and new techniques may be developed.