Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research: Volume 6

Welcome to Volume 6 of Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research. This issue contains an eclectic collection of behavioral research papers that examine several very important issues. Several of the papers focus on various aspects of auditors’ decisions such as professional commitment in public accounting firms, mitigating bias via group decision making, and appropriately using sample information to estimate errors in governmental auditing. The decisions of other professionals that use accounting information such as commercial lenders and divisional managers are also examined. Two papers examine how accounting information impacts the behaviors of individuals within an organization under various incentive structures. Two other papers provide perspectives on overall research with one developing a classification scheme for new assurance services and the other examining factors that impact research productivity of accounting faculty members. Overall, this is a very enlightening group of papers that provide insight into the behaviors of various users of accounting information.

In the text, use the form Rosman et al. (1995) where there are more than two authors, but list all authors in the references. Quotations of more than one line of text from cited works should be indented and citation should include the page number of the quotation; e.g. (Dunbar, 2001, p. 56).

This study models auditors’ professional commitment as the product of socialization forces operating within the public accounting profession. The results of a structural equation analysis from a sample of 349 auditors representing international, national and regional firms indicate that firm size is inversely related to professional commitment. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a strong relationship exists between an auditor’s political ideology and professional commitment. Politically conservative auditors, reflecting the dominant ideology in public accounting, reported significantly higher professional commitment than politically liberal auditors.

Studies that have indicated that the processing of audit evidence results in judgment bias may be the result of the study of individual decision-making. Building on work that suggests important differences between individual and group decision-making, this paper evaluates decision-making attributes of audit groups. Experienced auditors from offices of Big-Five firms in the U.S. served as the participants in an experiment involving the going concern judgment. Results show that recency does affect the judgments of individual auditors but disappears as an important effect when groups make judgments. Group responses are less extreme and exhibit greater confidence than those of individuals.

This paper investigates state auditors’ decisions regarding the isolation or projection of sample misstatements to underlying sample populations. Seventy-eight state auditors completed four treatment cases that incorporate the complete 2×2 manipulation of intentional/unintentional and systematic/non-systematic misstatements in different case scenarios, enabling a test of the independent variables both across and within case scenarios.

The results indicate that both across and within case scenarios, auditors tend to project systematic misstatements more often than they project non-systematic misstatements. However, the auditors’ isolation/projection decisions are generally not influenced by whether the sample misstatements are intentional or unintentional.

Data were collected from loan officers using a computerized process-tracing program to help shed some light on how source credibility impacts the judgments made by loan officers. Loan officers did not structure loans more restrictively regardless of whether they were in the positive or negative character condition or whether they approved or denied the loan. Negative source credibility affected decision process effort but did not produce the tradeoff between loan approval and loan structure that is suggested in the literature. Although significantly more (fewer) loans were denied when character information was negative (positive), a majority of loan officers in the negative character condition approved the loan. While most loan officers were aware of negative source credibility, they did not react by denying loans or adjusting loan structure.

Recent events have shown that earnings management is a significant problem in the business world and that the culture in place in many organizations may encourage managers to manipulate earnings. While prior research has shown that earnings management exists at the corporate level, it has not examined whether managers at the divisional level are motivated to manage earnings. The purpose of this study is to examine whether divisional managers will be more inclined to manage earnings in order to maximize personal wealth. The secondary research objective is to examine whether the information frame will impact discretionary management accounting decisions. Members of the Institute of Management Accountants participated in an earnings management study in which two conditions were manipulated. First, the annual compensation of subjects was contingent on whether target income was met or not met. Second, information about a potentially obsolete inventory item was framed as either positive or negative. Subjects were asked the likelihood they would write off the potentially obsolete inventory. Research findings support the earnings management hypothesis and indicate that managers are less likely to write off obsolete inventory when their compensation is impacted by the write-off. Study results also reveal that the manner in which the inventory information is framed may affect managers’ write-off decision. These results are important as they may indicate that earnings management is more pervasive throughout the organization than previously shown.

Recent innovations in management control systems, such as the Balanced Scorecard System, reflect today’s complex business environment by accounting for performance in multiple areas. When individuals must allocate their time between multiple areas that compete for their time, the manner in which incentives are structured is hypothesized to influence their decisions differently depending on goal difficulty. A decision-making experiment was conducted to test this proposition. When incentives were structured so that each area of the Balanced Scorecard is rewarded separately, challenging goals received more planned attention than easy or unattainable goals following previous findings. When incentives were structured so that goals in all areas must be achieved together, the influence of goal difficulty on the time planning decision diverges from previous findings such that areas having unattainable goals receive the same planned attention as areas having challenging goals. The results suggest that companies must consider how performance is rewarded within a Balanced Scorecard framework.

This paper explores the relationship between fairness in contracting and the creation of budgetary slack. A laboratory experiment was performed in which privately informed subjects were compensated under either a truth-inducing or slack-inducing incentive contract. Contracting processes were either fair or unfair as defined by procedural justice theory (Leventhal, 1980; Lind & Tyler, 1988). Under the slack-inducing contract, subjects exposed to the fair contracting process created significantly less slack than subjects exposed to the unfair contracting process. Slack created by subjects compensated under the truth-inducing contract was low and insensitive to the fairness or unfairness of the contracting process employed.

This study examines the research behavior of Australian and New Zealand accounting faculty to determine the characteristics that influence research productivity. University reputations are integrally linked with research performance and determining the qualities that predict research behavior may be of particular value in the selection and recruitment process. The study finds that two key factors significantly impact performance: holding a Ph.D. and having an academe-oriented rather than profession-oriented background. These results may be interpreted as affirming the U.S. model of developing specialist academic researchers through doctoral education programs rather than employing faculty with strong professional experience.

When decision makers encounter new assurance services that can be customized for individual clients, they must include them in their pre-existing categorization of assurance, a cognitive task known as postclassification. This paper draws upon three literatures (classification research in accounting, theory of assurance, and cognitive psychology) in order to suggest how this task might be modeled and studied empirically, using the example of SysTrust™. The role of a necessary condition for successful postclassification called the category use effect (Ross, 2000), in which decision makers are reminded of pre-existing categories when they learn to use new categories, is explained.