Accounting for Strategy and Management Control - Essay Example

888). In this paper, though, the context of “winner’s curse” is in the nature of cost underestimation leading to bids below actual costs in auctions for business contracts, such as construction projects. Winner’s curse refers to the loss incurred in winning a project in an auction, on a bid below actual cost. The chosen article is a well-written piece and has been published in at least one peer-reviewed academic journal. As with every study, however, there are aspects in which it may be improved upon, as well as those in which it excels.

These points shall be discussed here, section by section. The introduction provides an overview of the organization of the paper, which is helpful to the reader. But the introduction is written like an abstract that immediately jumps to the conclusion, and does not elaborate on the contextual basis of the study. The reader has to peruse this section repeatedly to get an idea of the perspective of the research, something which the authors could have addressed by developing a comprehensive background to the problem that describes real world situations that the study finds application in.

By allowing the reader to familiarize himself with the topic from the basis of past experiences or commonly encountered situations, the introduction would have provided the reader a better comprehension of the full implications of the study. The introduction also makes use of many terms which, while not entirely specialized or complicated, admits of specialized operational meanings as they are used in the study. For instance, the very use of “winner’s curse” is in the sense of sellers of goods and services in the auction and award of projects, not in the more general and commonplace sense as described in the Encyclopaedia of Operations Research & Management Science (see opening paragraph).

While the