Because of conflicting incentives among participants, collaborations (e.g., strategic alliances, joint ventures, and work teams) present a significant control challenge to managerial accountants. On the one hand, formal controls such as sanctioning and monitoring systems improve cooperation by reducing the incentives for opportunistic behavior. On the other hand, prior research finds that the mere presence of a control system causes decision makers to view the collaborative setting as noncooperative, and other collaborators as untrustworthy. In this paper, we conduct two experiments in which participants act as business collaborators. Through these experiments, we examine the effects of control on trust and cooperation in collaborative settings. Specifically, we posit and provide evidence that a strong control system can enhance the level of trust among collaborators. The mediating role of control-induced cooperation provides the mechanism by which control systems can increase trust in collaborative environments. Furthermore, we show that this increased trust has a positive effect on the subsequent level of cooperation among collaborators. Taken together, the results suggest an increasing marginal benefit of control system strength arising from the trust that control-induced cooperation engenders. The implication is that firms will choose to implement a stronger control system than previous research would seem to suggest.

Prior work has examined antecedents and behavioral outcomes of satisfaction in an offline setting but few studies explore whether the findings hold for increasingly important online settings. This paper extends the prior work to explore the antecedents of e‐satisfaction and the relations between e‐satisfaction and two new behaviorial outcomes related to an online setting; customers' stated purchasing behavior (i.e. conversion) and actual browsing behavior (i.e. stickiness). Using a sample of 145 predominantly multi‐channel retail firms, the paper highlights two main results. First, existing models that examine the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction in the offline setting, also apply to an online setting. Second, Web site characteristics had a significant impact on all three types of behavioral outcomes, while Web site customer service was a significant driver of only retention/referral outcomes. Further, Web site customer service may be a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieving favourable outcomes in online settings.

In this study, we examine the effect of incentive contract framing on agent effort in an incomplete contract setting. Prior research suggests that when governed by complete incentive contracts, agents exert greater effort under penalty contracts relative to bonus contracts. However, in an incomplete contract setting, in which the incentive contract does not govern all tasks for which the agent is responsible, the agent's trust in the principal is relevant. In this setting, we predict that bonus contracts create a more trusting environment, and this effect spills over to tasks not governed by the incentive contract, such that bonus contracts elicit greater effort on these tasks as compared to penalty contracts. We develop and experimentally validate a theoretical model of the effects of contract frame on trust and effort in this incomplete contract setting. The main intuition behind the model is that the framing of an incentive contract affects the degree to which the contract terms are interpreted by the agent as a signal of mistrust. More specifically, penalty contracts engender greater distrust than do bonus contracts and, therefore, when contracts are incomplete, penalty contracts lead to lower effort on tasks not governed by the contract than do bonus contracts.

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