Accounting for cognitive time in activity-based costing: A technology for the management of digital economy
提出认知时间驱动的基于活动的成本核算技术，解决数字经济中人类认知时间作为关键资产却缺乏管理手段的问题，揭示忽视认知时间估计误差导致的经济低效。
Human cognitive time has become a key asset of the digital economy, yet we lack the means to manage it. In response to that need, we propose a technology to manage cognitive time in economic organizations. This technology is called cognitive time-driven activity-based costing (CTABC), and it extends the established time-driven activity-based costing technology. CTABC accounts for human agents' cognitive time and the fact that cognitive time typically does not equal physical clock time for a given economic activity. CTABC also unearths a hidden lever effect that leads to considerable economic inefficiencies. An illustration of the proposed CTABC shows the limitations of contemporary approaches to cost assessments, which ignore errors caused by workers' cognitive time estimation. This paper contributes to the literature on cost accounting technology and the future of the digital economy. Specifically, it enriches the literature on the problem of the accuracy of employees' time estimates.