Our findings, however, should be interpreted with the following caveats in mind. First,
our method and tests implicitly assume that the firms in our sample are in equilibrium. But,
firms in our sample may have been in the process of modifying their strategies and performance
measurement systems, and in the transition process there may be firms that
achieve better matches (hence, performance) than others (Moores and Yuen 2001). This
may explain, at least partly, the mixed support for the contingency view of performance
measurement in our, but also prior, work (Ittner, Larcker, and Randall 2003; Said et al.
2003). Cross-sectional, contemporaneous data cannot totally rule out this possibility. Future
research that uses longitudinal data and/or is able to capture identifiable changes in firms’
strategies and measurement systems would help to address this issue.