Role of Accounting Standards
4. Management inherently has an incentive to voluntarily disclose the private
information it possesses about the entity because the value of the entity may be
unduly lowered by the conservative risk assessment of investors. Accordingly,
information needed by investors would be voluntarily disclosed to some extent, even
if there were no public regulation. Nevertheless, even in that case, minimum rules
are necessary to eliminate false information as well as to ensure homogeneity of
information, and it would be too costly to determine the rules through negotiations
(contracts) between counterparties. In order to reduce such cost for the society as a
whole, typical contracts are generalized and formed into accounting standards.
Accounting standards are expected to function as a social norm supporting the
disclosure system.