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顧客與供應商關係與成本結構
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1. Introduction
The traditional model of cost behavior assumes that costs vary proportionally with
sales regardless the sales increase or decrease. However, recent studies document that
costs behave asymmetrically—costs fall less with decrease in sales than they rise with
equivalent of sales increase (Anderson, Banker, and Jankirama, 2003). This asymmetric
cost behavior is labeled as “cost stickiness”, which recognizes the primitives of cost
behaviors— resources adjustment costs and managerial decision.
1
When sales decrease,
managers tend to retain resources to avoid adjustment cost of cutting inputted resources,
such as loss of disposal on equipment and severance payment to laid-off employees. In
contrast, when sales increase, managers acquire additional resources in response to the
market demand. When managers are uncertain about future demand, they tend to retain
resources in order to lower the adjustment costs of reducing resources or restoring
resources until they are more certain about the future demand.
Prior studies analyze how the degree of cost stickiness varies with the interaction
between managerial decision and adjustment costs and provide economic, agency, and
behavioral explanations for cost stickiness. For example, the seminal paper on cost
stickiness by Anderson et al. (2003) documents that stickiness of selling, general, and
administrative (SG&A, here after) costs is positively associated with resources adjustment
costs. Since adjustment costs tend to be higher when SG&A cost activities rely more on
assets owned and employees hired than on materials and services purchased by a
company, the degree of stickiness increases with the asset intensity and employee intensity
of a company. Likewise, using the employment protection legislation (EPL) provision in
19 OECD countries as a proxy for adjustment costs, Banker, Byzalov, and Chen (2013)
find that firms in stricter EPL countries demonstrate greater cost stickiness. Another
stream of studies focuses on agency explanations. Specifically, prior studies suggest that
empire-building incentives motivate managers to keep excess resources, resulting in
greater cost stickiness (Chen, Lu, and Sougiannis, 2012) while earnings-management
incentives motivate managers to cut down the costs to improve earnings performance,
resulting in lower cost stickiness (e.g., Dierynck, Landsman, and Renders, 2012; Kama
and Weiss, 2013). In addition, managerial optimism and pessimism could reflect either
1 Costs are “anti-sticky” if they increase less in response to sales increases than they fall when sales
decrease (Weiss, 2010).