Responsibility Under The Agency Theory Accounting Mechanism

More and more modern corporations are performing decentralizing management, owing to the increasing of the complexity in economic activities and the uncertainty in outside environments. But, decentralizing management cause more management control problems. As the prime control measure in decentralizing management, responsibility accounting is playing more and more important role. However, because of deviating from the real economic life and the rapid development of marketing economy, the traditional responsibility accounting based on controllability principle has revealed its defects and can't fulfill new demands caused by economic activities. As the important part of information economics, agency theory emphasizes individual behaviors and studies the asymmetric information problems widely existing in real economic life. The new thinking styles and research methods of agency theory can expand our thinking of researching into responsibility accounting.In the view of agency theory, this article researches into responsibility calculating system. After thoroughly analyzing several conclusions of agency theory and the defects of controllability principle, this article points out that responsibility calculating system should be based on risk-sharing principle, being informative should be the criterion which decides whether the variables can be used to evaluate agents. Based on this principle, this article studies transfer price and cost allocation. It concludes the characteristics of transfer price and cost allocation under agency theory, evaluates the old systems in the view of agency, and designs new negotiated transfer price system, which includes firm-wide profit and division profit, and budgeting cost allocation system.It makes sense to study responsibility accounting problems under agency theory both in theory and in practice.