Behavioral Research in Accounting
Published annually by the Accounting, Behavior and Organizations Section of the AAA

• A Note From the Editor- Jacob G. Birnberg
• The Effects of Choice on Auditors’ Intrinsic Motivation and Performance - D’Arcy A. Becker
• Herding Behavior: Explanations and Implications - Jane M. Cote and Debra L. Sanders
• A Note on Cross-Sectional Tests for Knowledge Differences - Larry R. Davis, Margaret D. Dwyer and Gregory M. Trompeter
• The Behavioral Foundations of Stewardship Accounting and a Proposed Program of Research: What is Accountability? - John W. Dickhaut and Kevin A. McCabe
• De-escalation Strategies: Some Experimental Evidence - Dipankar Ghosh
• Social Utility in a Transfer Pricing Situation: The Impact of Contextual Factors - Penelope Sue Greenberg and Ralph H. Greenberg
• Using Structural Equation Modeling to Investigate the Causal Ordering of Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment Among Staff Accountants - Peter J. Poznanski and Dennis M. Bline
• Adaptive Responses to Time Pressure: The Effects of Experience on Tax Information Search Behavior - Brian C. Spilker and Douglas F. Prawitt
• A Study of the Relations Among Disagreement in Budgetary Performance Evaluation Style, Job-Related Tension, Job Satisfaction and Performance - Freddie Choo and Kim B. Tan
• The Relationship Between Public and Private Information: An Experimental Markets Study - Robert R. Tucker
• Sensitization to the Rights and Welfare of the Participants in Accounting Research - Timothy J. Rupert and Martha L. Wartick
• The Effect of Industry Experience on Hypothesis Generation and Audit Planning Decisions - Sally Wright and Arnold M. Wright

Prior studies of the relative contributions of information choice and information processing in decision making have concentrated on the results of information choice, ignoring possible effects from the act of choosing. This paper investigates effects on auditors’ intrinsic motivation and decision performance that are due only to the act of choosing information to use in the decision task. A model linking the act of choosing to intrinsic motivation and performance is proposed and tested. Results of the experiment show that auditors given a choice of information were more intrinsically motivated and predicted more accurately than auditors given equally-predictive information, but who had no choice of information.

Herding behavior occurs when individuals use a consensus opinion to modify their private beliefs. It is a response to task complexity created by constraints on time, information or ability. Various factors have been hypothesized to influence herding, including: concern over one’s reputation, forecast ability, perceived credibility of the consensus forecast, and the variance among the individual opinions comprising the consensus forecast. Using a field experiment, we empirically test these theoretical explanations of herding behavior. Subjects were drawn from a population of investors who combine assets to construct a jointly managed equity portfolio. The circumstances under which they participate in their portfolio management create an environment that parallels the decision-making environment of professional analysts. The subjects were given information about a specific company, including a consensus analysts’ forecast, and were asked to generate earnings predictions. The type of information available to the subjects was varied in order to distinguish between herding behavior and alternative explanations for a correlation among forecasters’ opinions. The results indicated that forecasters who highly valued their reputation among their peers were more likely to engage in herding behavior. Self perceived forecast ability was found to be inversely related to herding behavior levels. In addition, forecasters’ assessment of the consensus forecast credibility increased herding behavior. However, forecasters were not influenced by the variation among individual opinions comprising the consensus forecast.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether selection bias stemming from firms’ employee selection and individuals’ career decisions rather than learning may, at least in part, account for differences between individuals with different levels of audit experience. More specifically, we investigate whether knowledge differences that previous research indicates exist between students and practicing auditors also exist between students who do and do not enter public accounting. Experimentally, we compare the performance of students who are entering public accounting to the performance of students who are not entering public accounting. The results indicate that students entering public accounting have systematically higher levels of auditing-related knowledge than do students who do not enter public accounting. These results suggest that cross-sectional tests for learning based on comparisons of students and experienced auditors may be confounded, and that interpretation of previously documented differences between experienced auditors and students as evidence of experiential learning and firm training is suspect.

It is commonly believed that accountability distinguishes accounting information systems from other types of information systems. (See The Commission on Auditors’ Responsibilities: Report, Conclusions, and Recommendations 1978.) An accounting information system records and classifies the exchanges that are made in the stewardship of particular assets. Once recorded, this information is made public, holding the steward accountable for his/her actions. In agency models, accountability is modeled by precisely defining the incentive inducing protocol which relates observable output to the steward’s share of output. Even in the absence of such a protocol, experimental evidence suggests that the simple act of recording a steward’s exchanges creates accountability by causing her/him to modify her/his behavior in light of this accounting. Such behavioral modifications systematically occur in absence of enforceable contracts defined on output and can occur in the absence of repeat interactions. Apparently, accountability has greater scope.

The purpose of this research is to test whether control procedures can reduce escalation of commitment, that is, the tendency of decision makers to persist with a project in spite of negative feedback that the initial investment has not realized its goals. Three control procedures which may mitigate escalation tendencies were examined: (1) providing unambiguous feedback regarding previous expenditures, (2) preparing a progress report on the project, and (3) providing information about future benefits of additional expenditures. This research hypothesizes that these controls will mitigate escalation tendencies.

The task for the experiment and the operationalization of control mechanisms in this research was adapted from an actual project undertaken by a nationally known fast-food chain. The experimental results support the research hypotheses. Specifically, the evidence shows that the provision of precise feedback and information on future benefits of additional expenditures significantly reduces the tendency to escalate commitment. Similarly, preparation of the project’s progress report significantly moderates additional resource commitment compared to the resources committed in absence of a report.

Social utility is the (dis)utility that arises from the comparison of one’s own outcomes with the outcomes of others. For a transfer pricing situation, buyers’ and sellers’ utilities (judgements of satisfactions) were elicited for situations where the relative outcomes were equally distributed, advantageously distributed and disadvantageously distributed. The utility measures were used in two ways. First, various functional forms were examined. The utility functions incorporated arguments for one’s own outcome (nonsocial utility) and the comparison with outcomes of others (social utility). The utility function with the best fit was a social utility function, and was generally steeply increasing and convex for disadvantageous distributions and weakly declining and convex advantageous distributions. Second, based on the social utility function identified, the utility measures were examined for the impact of the contextual variables. Three contextual variables, cost situation (increased cost versus decreased cost), role (buyer versus seller) and prior relationship (positive versus negative) were manipulated. All three of these variables had an effect on some aspect of social utility. This study provides evidence that social utility can exist in a managerial accounting situation and that contextual variables can impact that utility.

The significant results reported using job satisfaction and organizational commitment as antecedents to turnover intentions, and their extensive use in behavioral research, make the causal relationship between them a subject of interest in accounting and other fields. This study addresses the causal ordering of these two constructs. Using staff accountants as subjects, and structural equation modeling as the statistical technique, the results indicate a causal ordering from organizational commitment to job satisfaction.

Time pressure is an important feature of many accounting settings. This study describes a theoretical basis and provides supporting empirical evidence regarding how experience influences adaptation to time pressure in a tax information search task. Forty-three tax professionals and 53 graduate tax students participated in a computerized experiment in which subjects selected relevant key words relating to a partnership tax issue. Results are consistent with the idea that, in response to time pressure, experienced decision makers are able to selectively identify and encode information important in the context of an information search task to a greater extent than inexperienced decision makers. This increased selectivity allowed experienced subjects to respond to time pressure by (1) reducing the amount of time they spent initially assimilating the problem statement to a greater extent than inexperienced subjects, (2) decreasing the amount of time they spent referring back to the factual case information to a greater extent than did inexperienced subjects, and (3) increasing the degree to which they searched more important areas of the database per unit of search time to a greater extent than did inexperienced subjects. These findings provide new insights on how time pressure and experience interactively affect the way decision makers selectively encode and use information during information searches.

This study extends previous research in the area of supervisory style as it pertains to the use of budgetary information for performance evaluation. Previous work has focused exclusively on the superior’s budgetary performance evaluation style. This study focuses on both the superior’s perceived and the subordinate’s preferred budgetary performance evaluation styles. When the subordinate’s preferred style disagrees with the superior’s perceived style, this disagreement is hypothesized to lead to the subordinate’s feeling higher job-related tension and lower job satisfaction. One hundred ten subjects from ten firms participated in this study. The results support the hypothesized relations.

This study also examines two mediating models, (1) job-related tension that may mediate the relationship between disagreement in budgetary performance evaluation style and performance, and (2) job satisfaction that may mediate the relationship between disagreement and performance. The results indicate that both job-related tension and job satisfaction mediate the relationship between disagreement in budgetary performance evaluation style and performance. Finally, a structural equation model is used to determine the overall impact of disagreement in budgetary performance evaluation style on the subordinate’s job-related tension, job satisfaction and performance.

This study investigates the relationship between public and private information using experimental markets. The level of public disclosure is varied to examine the effect on private information consumption and the informedness of price. The experimental setting consists of a double-auction security market and an information market running concurrently. After all traders received public information, the markets commenced and both the informedness of price and the amount spent on private information were determined endogenously.

The results indicate that an inverse relation exists between public disclosure and private information consumption and between the informedness of price and private information consumption. The evidence also suggests that the overall informedness of traders increases with increases in the level of public disclosure. These results are consistent with the predictions of Verrecchia (1982a, 1982b).

Unlike prior studies, this study finds that, after considering the cost of information, less-informed traders earned considerably more than relatively informed traders and this was consistent over all subject groups, days and levels of public information.

Over the last 30 years, incidents of suspected mistreatment of human subjects have been sporadically reported by the press. While most of the headlines have involved medical studies, social science and behavioral research have occasionally been the subject of criticism as well. Concern for the rights of human subjects in research studies led to the enactment of federal legislation requiring the review and monitoring of human-subject research. This legislation most notably mandated the creation of institutional review boards at every university or other organization that conducts biomedical or behavioral research involving human subjects. This paper discusses the federal requirements for review of accounting research, and specifically discusses features of accounting research that may affect the review process. In addition, based on the results of a survey of research administrators, potential problems that accounting researchers may face and the consequences of bypassing the review process are discussed.

A significant concern in behavioral research in accounting has been the effect of experience on judgment and decision making. As widely recognized, there are, however, several dimensions to experience, including general domain experience and task-specific experience. One important dimension that has received limited attention is industry experience. For instance, in an audit context, greater industry experience is expected to lead to greater effectiveness and efficiency as auditors develop a knowledge base of the unique risks and audit approaches for a particular industry. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of industry experience on the generation of hypotheses of likely errors in conducting analytical procedures. Other audit-planning tasks are also examined (e.g., risk assessment and extent of testing).

Seventy-two auditors, 34 with significant retailing experience and 38 without such experience (both groups ranging in rank from senior to partner), completed a comprehensive, realistic case for a retailing client. Four material errors, three relating to a retailing environment, were present in the case. The findings indicate that industry experience significantly enhanced hypotheses generation in identifying errors but did not affect risk assessments or revisions to planned extent as expected. Proportionately greater audit hours were, however, assigned to more experienced audit staff for misstated accounts.