Date of Award

2018

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Graduate Group

Accounting

First Advisor

Brian Bushee

Second Advisor

Christopher Ittner

Abstract

This thesis investigates accounting issues related to intangibles in inter-firm contracting and information-sharing settings. In contracting over intellectual properties (e.g., patents), accounting-based payments are commonly used to mitigate valuation and incentive problems (Kamien, 1992), and in turn, create misreporting problems between contracting parties. In the first essay, I investigate how such misreporting risk affects the design of contract audit terms. In the second essay, co-authored with Jennifer Blouin, I use technology licensing agreements as a setting to document the presence of implicit taxes in large-sample inter-firm contracts. In the third essay, co-authored with Brian Bushee and Thomas Keusch, I focus on information sharing among competitors in the technology sector and potential proprietary benefits of voluntary disclosure. In particular, we investigate the implication of “co-opetition” (i.e., cooperation among competitors) on managers’ ability to predict future performance.

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