| dc.description.abstract | Most of extant research documented the phenomenon of stickiness through a single-period model, following Anderson et al. (2003), which does not take prior sales change direction into account. Thus the model seizes the weighted average degree of cost asymmetry and the conclusion may be biased. Given this view, this study, following Banker et al. (2014), incorporates two dummy variables－prior sales increase and prior sales decrease, which allows us to examine the effect of prior sales increase and decrease on cost behavior.
This study uses listed companies on the TWSE, OTC, and ESM in Taiwan as research subjects and investigates the influence of prior sales change direction on asymmetric cost behavior. The cost categories that we study are operating costs, and its components－cost of goods sold, SG&A costs, marketing expenses, administrative expenses, R&D expenses, and number of employees. As expected, for all cost categories, this study documents evidences that the extent of costs rise for concurrent sales increase is smaller following prior sales decrease than following a prior sales increase. On the contrary, the magnitude of a decrease in costs for concurrent sales decrease is greater following prior sales decrease than following prior sales increase. Also, we find that costs exhibit stickiness behavior as sales increase in prior period, and exhibit anti-stickiness behavior as sales decrease in prior period. | en_US |