Over the last 20 years, a significant amount of knowledge has been accumulated in the management accounting literature on the forms and features of controls in inter-organizational settings (e.g., Groot and Merchant 2000; Langfield-Smith and Smith 2003; Coletti, Sedatole, and Towry 2005; Dekker and Van den Abbeele 2010; Nicolaou, Sedatole, and Lankton 2011; Caglio and Ditillo 2012; Anderson, Christ, Dekker, and Sedatole 2013; Anderson and Dekker 2005). These controls have been conceptualized in various ways (as formal and informal, ex ante and ex post, ideals and hybrids) and investigated with different theoretical approaches to identify both antecedents and consequences, as well as the way they are employed in practice. However, the understanding of these complex inter-organizational control forms does not seem to have achieved its full potential. The paper by Dekker, Ding, and Groot (2016) provides an important addition to the comprehension...
