Simulation in management accounting and management control: editorial

Abstract

This special issue of the Journal of Management Control focuses on simulation in management accounting and management control. Since simulation is anything but new in the domain of management and business administration, and, hence, some remarks for motivating the subject of this special issue appear appropriate. Therefore, it is helpful to distinguish between twomajor ways to make use of simulation methods in the field of management accounting and control. First, simulation methods are widely used as powerful tools within management accounting and management control: for example, the use of simulation for evaluating operational and financial risks has a long tradition, simulation helps to estimate errors incorporated in accounting numbers; and in a nutshell, what-if analyses and sensitivity analyses are simulative approaches for figuring out the effects of changes in parameters on relevant performance measures (e.g. Zannetos 1963; Economos 1969; Chan 1996; Leitner 2012). Keeping this in mind, simulation could be supposed to become even more relevant within management accounting and control since the need for tools reasonably increases which are capable to deal with uncertainty, complexity and dynamics. Second, simulation can serve as a research method in the domain of management accounting andmanagement control, and, in this respect, the picture is rather disparate: on the one hand, there is some evidence that, so far, simulation-based research in management accounting and control is of minor relevance, particularly, in comparison against the predominant methods like closed-form analytical modelling, empirical research and conceptual development of frameworks (Hesford et al. 2007). On the