By examining the relationship between measurement and regulation at the Interstate Commerce Commission between 1887 and 1940, the following article sheds light on a little-studied component of the commission's work. It argues that the nature of the accounting and statistical tools used by the ICC had an impact on the regulatory process, specifically that the difficulties encountered in the development of accurate and relevant railroad statistics often undermined the agency's ability to achieve its regulatory goals. At the same time, a changing economic, political, and social environment affected the regulators' perception of the type of data necessary to gain control of the industry's structure.

Reflecting recent studies that have highlighted the importance of product cost accounting, this article traces the resistance of American railroad managers to the tool, despite growing pressure from academic and engineering economists. This study reveals widespread misunderstanding among managers about the nature of railroad costs, particularly misconceptions about the proportion of fixed and variable costs and the definition of direct costs. It illustrates the impact of these misapprehensions through a detailed examination of Southern Pacific's interwar passenger strategy.

This article supplies a missing piece in the story of the growth of managerial technology—the development of discounted cash flow techniques for projecting the profitability of capital budgeting alternatives. The article traces the origins of these methods in the industrial sector to the early work of railroad locating engineers and describes the refinement of DCF practices by AT&T and chemical firms. It concludes with a discussion of the diffusion of this analytic tool through the interaction of practicing engineers, consultants, professional associations, and scholarly publications.

In tracing the work of Edwin Gay in the mobilization effort during the First World War, this article presents an intriguing picture of the wartime administration's gradual realization of its need for more accurate information for central economic and political decision making. Although Gay's specific agency was short-lived, the work he did, and the viewpoint he represented, contributed significantly to the search for coherent administration in the executive branch.

In this examination of the beliefs of Louis Brandeis about the twentieth-century corporation, we are given a paradoxical portrait of a man strongly committed to individual liberty and fulfillment who nevertheless became an outspoken advocate of Taylorism. By tracing Brandeis's views on the law and economics of me corporation and placing them against the jurist's belief in the primacy of society's needs, the article reveals the complexities and contradictions in Brandeis's thought as he struggled to visualize an order in which the interests of individuals and society would be identical.