Objectives
Managerial Accounting is used to manage and coordinate decisions in companies and organizations. It has a decisive interface function between functional and divisional company areas, links essential findings from many sub-disciplines of economics and develops these further in an application-oriented manner.
Interdisciplinary thinking and the ability to analyze and solve control and coordination problems arising from internal conflicts of objectives and information asymmetries are key qualifications for successful corporate management. Teaching at the Institute of Managerial Accounting focuses on fostering these key skills, while its research is dedicated to modeling and analyzing management and coordination problems from an economic perspective. In addition to the analysis of incentive systems for the purpose of decision influencing, research focuses on the economic analysis of corporate governance rules.
Contents
In the courses, theoretical and practical approaches to solving control and coordination problems are taught and further developed. The focus is on production and use of information: Which information should be provided to which decision-maker, who evaluates information? How is the information incorporated into incentive and control mechanisms and how does this question depend on the decision rights of the individual decision-makers?
For this reason, teaching focuses on information economics and institutional economics analyses and methods. On the other hand, the focus is on application-oriented questions related to cost accounting and cost management. In terms of methodology, the analyses uses analytical approaches of decision theory, game theory as well as approaches of microeconomics and industrial economics and apply these to concrete problems of business practice. A fundamental understanding of mathematics and statistics is both essential and prerequisite. Additional knowledge and methods are taught in courses offered by the institute or in cooperation with other institutes.