Innovative Data – Use-cases in Management Accounting Research and Practice

Abstract

This editorial provides an overview of innovative data and use-cases for management accounting research and practice. We cover data such as natural language, crowd-sourced ratings on online platforms, videos, geolocation, and satellite data. Moreover, we develop a matrix of new data sources and management accounting research topics and highlight combinations of data and topics that represent promising starting points for future research. Our goal is to inspire future research by showing the rich field of innovative data and the diversity of applications that are related to managerial decision-making and management control.

Keywords:

• alternative data
• decision-making
• management control
• textual analysis
• machine learning

Acknowledgments

We thank Laurence van Lent, Beatriz Garcia Osma, Lucia Bellora-Bienengraber, Sebastian Firk, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The data provider Quandl, for example, reports that 98% of the datasets they collect are not considered for outside sale (Kamel, 2019), i.e. do not seem to be useful for decision makers.

2 We use the term ‘use-case’ to refer to examples of a particular technology or technique ‘in use’, whether that use be in industry or recorded in prior research.

3 While we cover a broad variety of data, for brevity we also have excluded many data sources such as e-mail receipts (Quandl, 2021), credit/debit card data (AlternativeData.org, 2019), app usage and web traffic (EagleAlpha, 2021), web searches (Da, Engelberg, and Gao, 2011, Xu, Xuan, and Zheng, 2021) consumer panel and retail scanner data (NeilsenIQ, 2021), and others – which we leave for future research.

4 For a teaching case about inFeedo, see Dutta (2021).

5 For example, a Nasdaq Data Link database collects data on 1.5 million flights per year, and using this data, pre-identifies major acquisitions every few weeks (Nasdaq, 2022).

6 Source: Personal communication with a senior executive from Deutsche Telekom, May 2021.

7 In developing these tables, we do recognize that readers of the tables may be tempted to embark on a research project simply because there are no prior studies in that area, rather than pursuing an important research question. We caution readers against such an approach. 

8 We recognize that the use of computer-based monitoring to assess employee performance is not new (see for example, Hovorka-Mead, Ross Jr, Whipple, and Renchin, 2002, Stanton, 2000); however, the sophistication of such approaches, and the nature of data such approaches generate has changed in more recent times.

9 A recent editorial (Casas-Arce, Cheng, Grabner, and Modell, 2022) provides some additional suggestions for the role that techniques like advanced analytics can play in planning and forecasting.

10 We thank Mengjie Xu for the advice about alternative data being mentioned in conference calls.