MAA753
Term 2, 2014
Assignment 2
1. Type and Due date
This assignment involves team-based research proposal development. The last date for submitting this assignment report is Tuesday, the 23rd September, 2014 by midnight via the drop-box system on CloudDeakin. You can form your own team members of not exceeding four (ideally, three) but please let me know your team members in advance.
2. Specific Requirements
Student teams are required to do the following.
1. Choose one of the following three contexts. Discuss within your teams and understand the research problem clearly. State the problem in your report in about 100 words.
2. Identify suitable theory to examine the problem. Justify your choice of the theory in about 200 words and explain the use of the theory in about 750 words.
3. Specify and justify your hypotheses. Where necessary, state alternate and null hypotheses in about 200 words.
4. Identify and justify the specific research method relevant to examine the problem and go into each of the specific method-related details. These are, i) specifying the dependent and independent variables; ii) identifying suitable measures for these; iii) determining the sample size, sample selection process (random or non-random), iv) specifying where your team intends to collect data from and how the team plans to minimize problems to internal validity, construct validity and reliability. This section will need to be covered in about 950 words.
5. Suggest what steps you will undertake in the data analysis process and what specific techniques your team plans to adopt to examine the problem. This section will need about 500 words.
6. Identifying potential limitations of your study and possible future directions, if any. This section will need about 300 words.
Marks will be awarded for logical flow, clarity of ideas, and depth of analysis and attractiveness of presentation. Total marks are out of 100.
3. The Question Contexts
1. Knowledge management is an upcoming area of research. How knowledge exists, and how it is created, sustained, shared (or transferred), and enhanced are concerns that have not still found satisfactory answers. While you realize the practical difficulty in this research strand, you wish to embark on a project that examines specifically the role of knowledge sharing in complex disciplines such as accounting which have undergone huge changes in the nature of technology, fraud and governance in the last two decades. Specifically, you seek to know how firms use their knowledge sharing mechanisms to keep their professional staff continually up-skilled and trained to tackle changing demands.
2. Product variety management is yet another research strand. Although it is fairly entrenched in the operations management literature, the role of accountants to control the complex problems arising therefrom is not well understood till date. At the outset, while increased variety can offer better choice to customers and thus increase a firm’s sales, studies have also found that increased variety can confuse customers and thus decrease the firm’s sales. Moreover, increased variety can increase the firm’s costs and thus reduce its profitability. Questions such as (i) how to avoid confusion, (ii) what the optimum level of variety is, (iii) how to reduce firms’ rising costs of variety, and (iv) how to evaluate a divisional manager and motivate better performance do remain without satisfactory responses. You seek to pick one or more of these questions and conduct research in a systematic manner.
3. Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) suggests that the choice between debt and equity in the capital structure of a firm is also governed by the specificity of the resources of the firm. If additional resources are required to be deployed in a particular investment opportunity (say, improving the firm’s operating processes) that is useful only to the firm itself, the capital is more likely to be generated through equity rather than debt. You want to examine the validity of this theory. In particular, you want to manipulate the degree of specificity to see if there are associated changes in the capital structure.