Conference Highlights
Plenary Sessions, Luncheons, Receptions, and Awards

You can attend plenary sessions, luncheons, and
award presentations — PLUS select from more than 240 concurrent sessions, more than 200 forum papers,
and 41 CPE sessions.

Plenary sessions of the American Accounting Association's Annual Meeting will be held from 8:30 to 9:45 am on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, August 6–8, 2007. This year's plenary sessions feature a wide ranging and impressive group of speakers from anthropology, archaeology, global studies, economics and law. Receptions, luncheons, and breaks offer opportunities for networking with colleagues and catching up with friends. During the evening of Sunday, August 5, the Exhibit Hall will host the informal Early Bird Reception and a chance to check out the exhibits. Also on Sunday evening the new Career Fair will be held near the Exhibit Hall. Monday night, August 6, is the Welcome Reception that includes food and beverages, and an opportunity to enjoy the gathering of our larger community. On Tuesday night, August 7, we will celebrate with a themed reception, featuring food and beverages to befit the meeting location.

Monday, August 6

Monday's plenary speakers will address the links between accounting and the fields of anthropology and archaeology.

Anthropologist Joe Henrich (UCLA Ph.D.) holds the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Evolution and is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Economics at the University of British Columbia. In 2004 he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States on young scientists. His theoretical and empirical research has been published in a wide range of journals, including Nature, Science, Current Anthropology, American Antiquity, American Economic Review, Journal of Theoretical Biology, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He coedited the volume Foundations of Human Societies, and coauthored Why Humans Cooperate, which is forthcoming in 2007.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat is Professor Emerita of Art and Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her field is the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East. She was trained at the Ecole du Louvre, Paris, France and her work is on the origin of writing and counting. Her publications include: How Writing Came About, Before Writing, The History of Counting, and numerous articles in major scholarly and popular journals (Science, Scientific American, Archaeology, American Journal of Archaeology, and Archaeology Odyssey). Her work has been widely reported in the public media (Scientific American, Time, Life, New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times). She was featured in several television programs.

Tuesday, August 7

The Tuesday plenary session will feature Michael Hechter and Eric Posner speaking on the emergence of social norms.

Michael Hechter is an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He has taught at the Universities of Washington, Arizona and Oxford. Hechter is the author of numerous books, including Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966, Principles of Group Solidarity, and Containing Nationalism. His articles have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Rationality and Society, Sociological Theory, European Sociological Review, and many other journals. Hechter's research revolves around three distinct themes: the causes of nationalism and group solidarity; rational choice explanations of macrosocial outcomes, and the role and measurement of individual values in social theory.

Eric Posner has authored or co-authored many books including Law and Social Norms, Chicago Lectures in Law and Economics, The Limits of International Law, New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis, and Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts. He is also an editor of the Journal of Legal Studies. He has published articles on bankruptcy law, contract law, international law, cost-benefit analysis, constitutional law, and administrative law, and has taught courses on international law, foreign relations law, contracts, employment law, bankruptcy law, secured transactions, and game theory and the law. His current research focuses on international law, immigration law, and foreign relations law. He is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School.

John Dickhaut is this year's Presidential Scholar and he will speak during the Tuesday luncheon. Dickhaut's research focuses on asking fundamental economic questions in the economics laboratory. Using experiments, he has broken ground in the areas of the role of information in economies, the laboratory study of preferences, trust, and neuroeconomics. Fundamental questions that Dickhaut continues to address are the impact of information processing considerations on the design of societal institutions, the ability to induce and infer preferences, the endogeniety of record keeping, verifiability, and formalized accounting in societies, the efficiency of prices of risky assets, and the nature of the choice process in the human neural system.

Wednesday, August 8

Robert E. Lucas, Jr. is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Member of National Academy of Sciences. He is a former editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He has published several books and articles in Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, American Economic Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Monetary Economics, and other leading academic journals. In 1995 Professor Lucas received the Nobel Prize in Economic Science "for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy." His current research examines monetary theory, growth, and development.

Vernon L. Smith, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002, "for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms," is currently Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University and research scholar in the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science in Arlington, VA. Dr. Smith is the President of the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics, which he helped found in 1997. Professor Smith received his bachelor's degree from California Institute of Technology, his master's from the University of Kansas, and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He has authored or co-authored over 250 articles and books on capital theory, finance, natural resource economics, and experimental economics.

During the Wednesday luncheon, incoming AAA President for 2007–2008, Gary J. Previts will address "Our AAA Member Community: Vision, Purpose, and Impact," which will look at our diversity of interests, our common heritage and history, and our changing member profile, including the increase in international members, all of which affect what we do as a discipline and as a profession to serve the needs of students and more broadly, the needs of society. Previts is Professor of Accountancy, Case Western Reserve University. He has served as a member of the AAA Executive Committee, and Chair/VP of the Ohio Region, and has received that region's Outstanding Educator Award. He has twice been program chair of the AAA Annual Meeting (l978 and l990) and has served on numerous AAA Committees or Task Forces. Previts has authored several books and published scores of papers on the development of accounting thought, regulation and education and is editor of Research in Accounting Regulation. He has received the Educator Lifetime Achievement Award of the AICPA.