Essays On Accounting Issues Related To Technology Transactions

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.