The Effect of Budget Emphasis and Information Asymmetry on the Relation Between Budgetary Participation and Slack.
研究预算参与如何影响预算松弛，发现上级的预算强调程度和上下级之间的信息不对称程度会共同调节这一关系，对管理会计研究者有参考价值。
Abstract A major concern in the literature is that participation by subordinates may result in the generation of slack budgets (Antle and Eppen 1985). In one of the earliest studies, Williamson (1964) concluded that subordinate managers will try to influence the budget-setting process and obtain slack budgets. In conformance with Merchant (1985a), Lukka (1988), and Young (1985), budgetary slack is defined as the express incorporation of budget amounts that make it easier to attain. Managers may build slack into budgets by strategies that understate revenues and overstate costs (Schiff and Lewin 1970). Whether budgetary slack is a likely outcome in all participatively set budgets is a matter of conjecture. Lukka (1988) argued that a high degree of participation gives subordinate managers the opportunity to contribute directly to the creation of slack, and vice versa. However, the link between participation and slack is equivocal, since Cammann (1976), Merchant (1985a), and Onsi (1973) provide evidence that participation may lead to a reduction in slack, which can be attributed to the positive communication between managers so that subordinates feel less pressure to create slack. The literature proposes a link between participation and budgetary slack through two variables: superiors' budget emphasis in their evaluation of subordinate performance, and the degree of information asymmetry between superiors and subordinates. When participation, budget emphasis, and information asymmetry are high (low), slack will be high (low). For this study, samples of managers were drawn from manufacturing organizations in the Sydney, Australia, metropolitan area. Measures of budgetary stack and information asymmetry were developed. Support was found for low (high) slack when the predictors are high (low).