경영자의 낙관주의적 오류와 비대칭적인 원가행태

초록

With respect to the cause of sticky costs, some streams of the literature focused on the effect of private managerial incentives on cost stickiness. After Anderson et al. (2003) proposed that sticky costs result from the agency problem, Chen et al. (2012) provided empirical evidence that empire-building incentives arising from the agency problem move the sales, general, and administrative (SG&A) cost asymmetry away from its optimal level. Balakrishnan and Gruca (2008), Kama and Weiss (2012), and Dierynck et al. (2012) insisted through case studies that sticky costs are derived from managers’ private incentives. Balakrishana et al. (2014) provided related evidence by focusing on short-run managerial incentives. A recently popular stream of the literature (i.e., Banker and Chen, 2006a; Banker and Byzalov, 2013; Banker et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2013; Banker et al., 2014) adopted an explanation for managerial expectations, as first noted by Anderson et al. (2003), which stated that SG&A stickiness could intensify during periods of economic growth. Recently, behavioral finance and accounting researchers have become interested in the implications of managerial overconfidence for managers’ decision-making. Overconfidence is a well-documented phenomenon in psychology (Allen and Evans, 2005). In particular, managerial overconfidence and optimism has had popular appeal as an explanation for asymmetric cost behavior (e.g., Banker and Chen, 2006a; Banker and Byzalov, 2013; Banker et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2013; Banker et al., 2014; Yang, 2015). Banker et al. (2014) explain a complex pattern of sticky costs by combining two opposing processes (cost stickiness conditional on a prior sales increase and cost anti-stickiness conditional on a prior sales decrease) that reflect the structure of optimal decisions and the impact of managers’ optimism. Chen et al. (2013) describe that SG&A cost stickiness increases as the degree of managerial overconfidence increases. Yang (2015) describe that optimistic bidder CEOs who overestimate the merged firm’s growth induce greater cost stickiness. This study aims to complement the behavioral accounting literature on the impact of managerial optimistic biases on resource allocation decisions. The primary studies in this area focused on the effect of managerial incentives on sticky costs as a managerial expectation explanation (e.g., Banker and Chen, 2006a; Banker and Byzalov, 2013; Banker et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2013; Banker et al. 2014). In particular, the rapidly growing literature aforementioned (e.g., Chen et al., 2013; Yang, 2015) suggested an overconfidence explanation for sticky costs from the behavioral perspective. In this context, we examine the impact of managerial optimistic bias on sticky cost behavior by using Lin et al. (2005)’s measure as a proxy of the managerial optimism. Hence, the proxy of the managerial optimism employed by Lin et al. (2005) may fail to reflect time interval between forecasting- and actual period. To mitigate this problem, we employ the difference between management’- and analyst’s sales forecast as a managerial optimistic bias. Further, we additionally adopt the measure of strong managerial optimism reinforced by learning and self-attribution bias. We first predict that managers who overestimate growth of future sales due to a bias related to miscalibration and the better-than-average effect are more patient with retaining unused capacity when sales decrease than do rational managers. This patience results in greater stickiness of committed costs. For the next stage, we expect that the optimistic managers who experience greater prior performance are more likely to retain unused slack when subsequent future sales decrease, as opposed to the managers who experience lower performance. This may be because successful managers assess the probability of realizing their optimistic expectations of growth more greatly owing to learning and the self-attribution bias. The results show that the cost stickiness in firms with optimistic managers exceeds that of firms with rational managers. Further, the degree of the cost stickiness in firms with optimistic managers grows even stronger with prior better performance. These are also consistent with alternative robust tests. We contribute to several streams of the literature. First, we complement the literature on sticky costs as an explanation for managerial expectation by examining—from an angle other than rational expectation—the effect of managerial optimistic bias that surpasses that of general managers on inelastic cost structure or over-slack resources. Finally, we contribute to the growing body of the behavioral accounting literature by adopting the difference between management’- and analyst’s forecast as a managerial optimistic bias, thus remedying the time interval problem of Lin et al. (2005)’s measure.

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