Kristy Towry 
John M. & Lucy Cook Chaired Professor of Accounting | Emory University, Goizueta Business School
Atlanta, GA, UNITED STATES
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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 (3)
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 (3)
Managerial Accounting
Internal Audit
Behavioral Economics
Publications (19)
Ambiguous Sticks and Carrots: The Effect of Contract Framing and Payoff Amiguity on Employee Effort.
The Accounting Review2023
The Impact of Knowledge Transfer on Investments in Knowledge Creation in Firms
Contemporary Accounting Research2022
Leading by Example: The Effect of Contract Design on the Ability to Lead
The Accounting Review2021
Bring the Noise, but Not the Funk
The Accounting Review2020
Vicarious Learning Under Implicit Contracts
The Accounting Review2016
Turning Up the Volume: An Experimental Investigation of the Role of Mutual Monitoring in Tournaments
Contemporary Accounting Research2013
Framing Sticks as Carrots: An Experimental Investigation of Contract Frame and Effort in Agency Relationships
The Accounting Review2012
Does the Communication of Causal Linkages Improve Effort Allocations?
Journal of Management Accounting Research2012
Performance Spillover in a Multi-Task Environment
Contemporary Accounting Research2012
In Search of Informed Discretion: An Experimental Investigation of Fairness and Trust Reciprocity
The Accounting Review2012
Dividing the Pie: The Influence of Managerial Discretion Extent on Bonus Pool Allocation
Contemporary Accounting Research2011
Flattening the Organization: The Effect of Organizational Reporting Structure on Honesty in Managerial Reporting
Review of Accounting Studies2010
Recordkeeping Alters Economic History by Promoting Reciprocity
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences2009
Contracting on Contemporaneous vs. Forward-Looking Measures: An Experimental Investigation
Contemporary Accounting Research2008
The effect of information systems on honesty in managerial reporting: A behavioral perspective
Contemporary Accounting Research2006 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
Contemporary Accounting Research2005 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
The Accounting Review2005 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
The Accounting Review2003 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?
The Accounting Review2002 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 ...
Research Spotlight
In the News (2)
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.
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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