Biography
Kristy L. Towry is John and Lucy Cook Chair and Professor of Accounting at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Professor Towry joined the Goizueta Business School faculty in 2002, after receiving her PhD from The University of Texas at Austin. She has extensive experience in managerial accounting and finance, including a number of positions at Exxon and Compaq. Professor Towry's research relates to the use of accounting information for managerial decision making, with a focus on managerial control systems and financial incentives. Her research, based on the experimental method, blends theory from economics, psychology, and other social sciences to provide insights into accounting issues. She has published in The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and other accounting and economics journals.
Education
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PhD in AccountingThe University of Texas at Austin
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MBA in Accounting and FinanceTexas A&M University
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BSc in Mathematics and Computer ScienceNorthwestern State University of Louisiana
Vicarious Learning Under Implicit Contracts
The effect of information systems on honesty in managerial reporting: A behavioral perspective
This study examines the behavioral impact of an information system, and how that impact varies with the information system's precision, in an internal reporting environment. We propose that a manager's reporting decisions are affected by his or her trade-off of the ...
Quantification and Persuasion in Managerial Judgement
Accounting involves assigning numbers to events—quantifying them. Conventional wisdom holds that putting numbers to an argument enhances its persuasive power. There is, however, little scholarly evidence to support or refute this claim, in accounting or ...
The effect of control systems on trust and cooperation in collaborative environments
Because of conflicting incentives among participants, collaborations (eg, 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 ...
Control in a teamwork environment - The impact of social ties on the effectiveness of mutual monitoring contracts
This study examines control in a teamwork setting, experimentally investigating two financial incentive systems that have been proposed in the agency-theory-based analytic literature. Both systems rely on mutual monitoring-the ability of team members to observe each ...
Negotiated transfer pricing: Is fairness easier said than done?
Questionnaire responses reported by Luft and Libby (1997) reveal that transfer price negotiators expect fairness-based price concessions that moderate the influence of an outside market price when the outside market price strongly favors one of the parties. We ...