Richard Saouma teaches Cost Accounting and Motivating Management at Anderson. The majority of his research answers how best to provide incentives in multi-divisional firms, particularly within the manufacturing industry. By demonstrating how inventory levels and buffers can be used to motivate workers, his work helps explain the mixed empirical evidence linking profits with Just In Time manufacturing practices. His more recent research focuses on budgeting; namely, he characterizes optimal budgeting practices in response to the firm's operating environment. Linking incentives to budgets, his research explains why firms may occasionally choose to continue negative NPV projects, as reported in earlier empirical studies.

Before arriving at Anderson, Professor Saouma received his Ph.D. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, after completing both a B.A. in Economics and Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. Between his studies at Berkeley, he worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington DC where he modeled the likelihood of declaring personal bankruptcy based on each state's individual bankruptcy code prior to the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.

Working Papers

Multi-Stage Resource Allocation under Asymmetric Information, (with Stanley Baiman and Mirko Heinle), February 2012.

On the Optimality of Participatory Budgeting, (with Mirko Heinle and Nicholas Ross), April 2012.

Ph.D. 2006, Stanford University
B.A. Applied Mathematics, 2001, UC Berkeley

Incentives in Manufacturing, Outsourcing, Managerial Compensation, Intra-firm Communication, Budgeting, Costing, Cost Allocation, Transfer pricing, Resource Allocation, Communicating Strategy with Balanced Score Cards