Value of Information

Abstract

As argued at the end of Chapter 6, many of the decision models developed by accounting researchers, especially in the early 1970s, ignored information costs. Although researchers attempted to relax many of the assumptions which were made, either implicitly or explicitly, in developing the models that formed the basis of management accounting’s conventional wisdom, the assumption of costless information remained intact for some time. In seeking to realistically model decision-making situations, researchers introduced considerable complexity into their models and created a potential demand for vast amounts of information. Neither the difficulties of obtaining such information, nor the associated costs were explicitly recognised in many of the models. However, in practice information is not costless.