STUDIES IN COST ALLOCATION AND EFFICIENCY EVALUATION.

摘要

This thesis explores some new possibilities in approaches to the problems of cost allocation and efficiency evaluation. These include consideration of issues of "equity" and "efficiency" that arise in the allocation of costs of common facilities to individual users, and extend to development of new techniques for dealing with existence of jointness and returns-to-scale encountered in efficiency evaluations and production cost variance analysis.; The issues of "fairness" and "equity" in cost allocations are addressed by means of an axiomatic framework that integrates a variety of different approaches to cost allocation stemming from information theory and game theory and comprehending commonly used practices in industrial cost accounting. The idea is to allow for considerations such as fairness and equity which may be important from the standpoint of maintaining organization relations but which have heretofore escaped attention in criticisms levelled at them from the standpoint only of individual decision making under economic theory. The analysis is further extended to integrate reformulated Shapley Value axioms from game theory with the axioms underlying traditional cost allocation principles to cover joint cost situations.; With this as background, the problem of economic efficiency is then reexamined in the context of the full cost allocation model that underlies these common industrial costing practices. An information economics model considers the use of full cost allocations to elicit information from the user divisions about the benefits derived by them from a common service. The use of such an information system is shown to increase the expected value of the aggregate decision to provide or discontinue a common service when the corporate management is assumed to have imperfect information aabout the benefits derived by the user divisions.; A second model is constructed to formally incorporate the possibility of enhancing the efficiency of the divisions in the utilization of a common resource, so that efficiency improvement may enable the divisions to obtain the same benefits from a smaller amount of the common resource. The question of determining the optimal amount to charge for a common resource is analyzed within this framework. Contrary to the conclusions reached by the usual economic analyses of the cost allocation problem, it is shown that the allocation of marginal costs would not, in general, lead to the maximization of the overall corporate profits.; The thesis also reports results of a field study of existing cost allocation practices at two large industrial organizations which are decentralized in a manner comparable to what has been visualized as a guide to the formal analyses. The idea of the field study was to utilize an in-depth on-the-site interview approach as a basis for understanding what might lie behind some of the practices employed in these two corporations and to obtain additional insight by eliciting the "views" of corporate and divisional managers on the purposes served by cost allocation schemes in large decentralized organizations.; Finally, the problem of efficiency evaluation is addressed within this thesis by means of still another framework afforded by a new approach for efficiency measurement suggested by A. Charnes, W. W. Cooper and E. Rhodes. Alternative game theoretic and production economics interpretations of their approach are provided to extend this method of efficiency measurement to situations involving non-constant returns to scale, and develop a new conceptual framework for analyzing production cost variances.