Abstract

Following the theoretical innovations of complementarity theory, management control studies have investigated potential interdepencies between management control practices. In this paper, we compare the two dominant statistical approaches in the management control literature to test for the presence of interdepencies. While prior literature focuses on the differences in the assumption of optimality between the demand function and per- formance function approach, we make all ancillary assumptions explicit. Our stimulation results reveal that the demand function approach is more robust to variation in optimality than the performance function approach. We use these results to formulate guidance for future research into interdependencies between management control practices.