The development and full-scale adoption of the activity-based costing (ABC) system in the United States is a relatively recent phenomenon. Recently, both academia and practitioners in Korea have shown growing interest in the activity-based costing system, and many firms are already using this system or are in the process of adopting it. Research on activity-based costing has been conducted in diverse ways, but it has primarily taken the form of case studies using field research methods, and can be considered to have lower rigor compared to existing accounting research. This paper briefly reviews the basic concepts of the activity-based costing system, which was developed as a means to overcome various problems of traditional cost accounting and to provide useful information for managers' strategic or managerial decision-making. Its purpose is to systematize the results of prior research on activity-based costing and to establish directions for future research.