Accounting Changes and Information Processing: Some Further Empirical Evidence
Garry Marchant
The hypothesis that individual decision makers will fail to adjust their
decision processes in response to changes in accounting method was investigated
using the Ashton [1976] selling price paradigm. This study replicates Swieringa,
Dyckman and Hoskin [1979} and Dyckman, Hoskin, and Swieringa [1982] with
one major change to their experimental design. To avoid a non-linearity
effect, which might induce a change in decision rule even in the absence
of an accounting change and thus confound the impact of the treatment,
the unit cost numbers were assigned the same mean before and after the
accounting change. In addition, the amount of information about the accounting
method change was varied. The task involved the setting of 30 selling prices
in two sets of 15 each. The change in the method of accounting for unit
cost occurred after the first set. The results showed that the majority
of subjects did not change their decision rules in response to the change
in accounting method. This evidence indicates that in the absence of a
non-linearity effect the data fixity hypothesis is confirmed.
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