The purpose with this thesis is to demonstrate that other factors than the existing set of rules could influence the Management Group’s decision in regards to depreciation of goodwill. We have explained the conflicts between the management group and the stakeholders by using the Agency Theory and the Stakeholder Model. We have used the Positive Accounting Theory to describe how the management group’s opportunistic behaviour decides which accounting method to use. The data that was collected was composed by secondary data in the form of the companies’ annual reports. The analytical tests were executed by using the Chi-square test. The test results of our part-hypothesis shows that three of them had significant connections. The connections shows that depreciation of goodwill is carried out in a large extent when following situations occur; negative result, down turn in stock price and in connection with a change of Managing Director. The results of our part-hypothesis demonstrate that other factors than the existing legislation affect the decision of depreciation of goodwill. How can this be explained? According to us, one reason can be that the management group has the possibility to make decisions with their own interest in mind, due to the “grey zone” that in our opinion exists in the current set of rules.

The dissertation is written in Swedish.