FORMALIZING PRODUCT COST DISTORTION: The Impact of Volume-Related Allocation Bases on Cost Information
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose o f this study is to formally analyze product cost distortions resulting from the process of allocating costs to products based on Activity-Based Costing (ABC) and the conventional product costing systems. The model developed in this paper rigorously shows the impact of treating costs that are not volume related as if they are. The model demonstrates that the source of product cost distortion is the difference between the proportion of driver used by each product in ABC and the proportion of the base used by the same product in the conventional costing systems. The difference arises because the conventional costing systems ignore the existence of batch-related and product-related costs. The model predicts a positive association between volume and size diversity with product cost distortions. When interaction between volume and size diversity exists, the distortion is either mitigated or exacerbated. The magnitude of the distortion is jointly determined by the size of the differences and the size of the total indirect costs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".