Kristy Towry

John M. & Lucy Cook Chaired Professor of Accounting Emory University, Goizueta Business School

  • Atlanta GA

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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

The University of Texas at Austin

PhD

Accounting

2002

Texas A&M University

MBA

Accounting and Finance

1988

Northwestern State University of Louisiana

BSc

Mathematics and Computer Science

1982

Areas of Expertise

Managerial Accounting
Internal Audit
Behavioral Economics

Publications

Ambiguous Sticks and Carrots: The Effect of Contract Framing and Payoff Amiguity on Employee Effort.

The Accounting Review

2023

The Impact of Knowledge Transfer on Investments in Knowledge Creation in Firms

Contemporary Accounting Research

2022

Leading by Example: The Effect of Contract Design on the Ability to Lead

The Accounting Review

2021

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Research Spotlight

3 min

Researchers urge: Learn from (someone else’s) experience

Measuring your performance as a business is critical. If you want to grow and be successful, you need to understand what you do well—and not so well. To paraphrase a couple of old adages, we all learn from our mistakes and our experience. But in today’s bumpy and fast-changing business landscape, measuring performance can be tough; tougher still if yours is a complex organization or industry. Whatever you’re looking at to gauge your firm’s performance—whether it’s customer satisfaction, say, or repeat purchases—your measures might well be less than perfect. And that’s because of noise—abstruse or unreliable data that makes it hard to unpack key metrics accurately and to learn from them. How successful a firm is in negotiating this performance measure noise depends on how that firm learns, said Kristy Towry, John and Lucy Cook Chair and professor of accounting at Goizueta Business School. She has led a study that looks at the way organizations and the people in them manage their learning. And she finds that we’re way more adept at cutting through the noise when we learn from each other, rather than basing our learning on our own firsthand experience. What the study found: What Towry and her colleagues found was that when there’s a lot of noise in the data we’re working with, our strategic learning is considerably improved when our learning is vicarious—that’s to say, when we learn from each other. This is down to how much of the big picture we see, said Towry. And experiential learning can make us myopic. “We know from psychology and from the results of this study that experiential learning—basing what we learn mainly off our own firsthand experience—can limit us. Experience tends to make us over-focus on what is happening in the here and now or what has just happened. We forget what happened before and don’t build that into our decision-making.” Vicarious learning, on the other hand, helps us to see the bigger picture. “When we’re learning from each other, it’s also experiential, but the learning is augmented by other people’s experience, meaning that we have a broadened perspective," said Towry. "We’re better able to see the big-picture patterns and trends.” When there’s a lot of noise and complexity to negotiate, vicarious learning helps us make better decisions. And this has huge implications for businesses operating in today’s environment. “Our world is not cut and dried at the best of times. Right now we are dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and the fallout on world economies and trade. The business context for most firms operating in this context is very far from stable, so we can assume there’s a lot of complexity and noise affecting our performance indicators. And with so much change afoot, the experiences we are all having in the workplace are what I would call fairly idiosyncratic,” said Towry. “Business leaders should be very aware of this.” To optimize strategic learning and thrive in complexity, firms need to find ways to allow vicarious learning to happen, she said. That means thinking about how to break down barriers to knowledge sharing, be they organizational silos or emerging challenges associated with things like remote working. Sharing information, insight, and understanding is essential. Kristy L. Towry is John and Lucy Cook Chair and Professor of Accounting at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. To learn more about this research or to talk with Kristy – simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.

Kristy Towry

1 min

Tournament strategies: Collusion or competition?

As many as one-third of US corporations make use of tournament incentive schemes, where compensation is linked to employees’ performance and ranking. But how does the degree of mutual monitoring— the ability of employees to observe each other’s productive activities—affect effort? In a study on mutual monitoring and rank-order tournaments, Lynn Hannan (Tulane); Kristy Towry, Goizueta Term Chair and associate professor of accounting; and Yue (May) Zhang (Northeastern) conduct two experiments to determine whether employees are more likely to collude, resulting in lower effort, or to compete, resulting in higher effort, when they are able to monitor each other during a tournament. They find that mutual monitoring can actually work in either direction, and that it depends on the workplace culture. For example, when management practices are perceived to be unfair, this creates a general inclination for workers to collude against management. In this case, mutual monitoring will amplify the collusion, resulting in lower effort. Likewise, when the workplace culture encourages competition, mutual monitoring contribute to higher effort. Source:

Kristy Towry

In the News

Sports doesn’t hold monopoly on high-stake tournaments

EmoryBusiness.com  online

2015-04-07

“There’s all kinds of evidence that people get a kick out of winning, even when a prize is not attached,” said Goizueta Business School Accounting Professor Kristy Towry, who researches behavioral economics.

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Carrots, Not Sticks Motivate Workers

Michigan State University  online

2012-06-20

Sedatole authored the study – titled “Sticks and Carrots: The Effect of Contract Frame on Effort in Incomplete Contracts” – with Margaret Christ of the University of Georgia and Kristy Towry of Emory University...

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