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he theory, so there is a small number of theories have contribute to the research of management accounting. For instance, Ittner and Larcker (2001) pointed that for promote the development of management accounting, researchers should not build their motivation of research on the commercial newspapers, and they should consider why a practice or research is interesting from the theory. Even though, compare with financial accounting, the development of management accounting theory is weak, but many theories of economics and management could be used in the field of management accounting to a large extent. For example, the contract theory is the most significant theory which has influence on the management accounting Lambert, 2001). The mainly features of contract theory has attracted the accounting researchers is that researchers could clearly reflect the conception of the conflict of interest, the incentives problems and the control of incentives in the specific model. This point is pretty important, because many problems of accounting and auditing are correlating with the control of incentive problems. In the basic hierarchy of accounting research, the agent theory has be mainly used to solve such two types of problems: (1) how the features of information, accounting and compensation system affect the incentive problems; (2) how the existing of incentive problems affect the information, accounting and the design of compensation system. Although the application of agent theory provided many efficient ways for the solving of financial accounting and auditing problems, until now, the largest beneficiary is the management accounting. In the accounting field especially in the research area of management accounting, how to proper measure the performance has became a very significant problem, because the accounting , budgeting system, performance measurement system, transfer pricing system and the decision support system have significant influence on the human being and the interaction within an organization. Recently, a growing number of criticism about the traditional performance indicator has lead managers to the wrong way, for what could be proved that the importance of performance measurement.

Based on the above discussion, many accounting theories (such like the agent theory) which have not been proved should become an important direction of the future research. In addition, the research should establish and test some general management accounting theory in the future.

Some problems in the future research

The first problem is the essence and modus of the value based accounting theory using in the process of organizational control. Many pessimist of the empirical research of management accounting consider that any enterprises do not use the management accounting technique in their control process. Therefore, many factual basis of empirical research may not exist. Although the new technique and new approach of management accounting do not widely use in enterprises, but there are also many problems could be analyzed by empirical evidence (for example, the compensation problems of managers). Moreover, although many enterprises has claimed that they did not use the “balance score card”, “economic value added”, “activity based accounting” and other advanced management techniques. Actually, the management approach which has been used by many enterprises could