The MM study aims to explore an anomaly between textbook prescriptions of budget target achievability levels and the authors' own field-based observations. Whereas accounting textbooks referred to laboratory experiments that consistently reported optimal managerial performance occurring when the probability of budget target achievement is approximately 50 percent, MM observed that actual profit center budget target achievability appeared to be set at considerably higher levels than this (a mean of 83 percent). They set out to quantify observed levels of budget achievement and to provide reasons for the high level of achievability of profit center budget targets. Furthermore, they identified a lack of empirical grounding in previous operationalizations of the term"achievable" compared with their own observations. The study is thus strongly connected to existing theory, but it captures well the social context of goal difficulty as a theory-defined variable.