Business Commons^™

The benefits of top down financial reporting regulation over the past eight decades are less obvious than its failures to achieve the purported goals. Perhaps it is time to give a chance to an alternative approach of regulatory competition.

Risk and uncertainty are inherent in the environment and functions of accounting. Accounting reports, systems, norms, and rules help people decide, and also determine how they decide in such environment. Diverse normative theories and descriptions of coping with risk and uncertainty yield different implications for accounting. Chambers was an articulate, forceful, and celebrated proponent of market values, while Ijiri did the same for historical costs. Elements of accounting theory that diverge in their emphases on historical cost versus market values can be linked to the divergence in the theories of risk and decision making. This largely unrecognized link between the …