The purpose of this study is to investigate some aspects of the relative usefulness of some alternative accounting measures for reporting to shareholders. Several theoretical arguments have been advanced in the literature which suggest that accounting numbers produced under alternative accounting models would be more useful to users of accounting information than those produced under the historical cost accounting model. One of the ~ priori arguments supporting these suggestions is that better predictions, and thus a greater degree of usefulness, are achieved when one of the alternative models is applied. However, little research aimed at testing the relative usefulness of accounting alternatives according to users' informational needs has been reported. Some of the studies available have been criticised for lack of relevance of the chosen object(s} of prediction to the informational requirements of users, an~or for the use of arbitrarily chosen, non-optimal prediction models in specifying the relation between objects of predictions and the accounting numbers tested. In addition, it has proved difficult to evaluate empirically the relative desirability of the alternative accounting measures under a variety of general and specific price changes conditions, sufficient for general conclusions to be reached, due to the unavailability of the necessary real-world data for a large sample of firms operating under different conditions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:629470 |
| Date | January 1976 |
| Creators | El-Azma, Mohamed Ahmed |
| Contributors | Arnold John |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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