On Auditors and the Courts in an Adverse Selection Setting
将代理模型中的效用最大化审计师引入信号博弈框架，分析法院对审计师的诉讼如何影响均衡及不同参与者的福利，适用于研究审计独立性、信息不对称与法律制度的学者。
Most models of auditing in the accounting literature may be classified as agency models or signaling models.' The emphasis in an agency model is on a single firm; the auditor is typically modeled as a utility-maximizing player who is hired by a firm's owner to better control a manager as well as to improve their risk-sharing arrangement. A signaling model, on the other hand, includes a larger set of players, and it focuses on the interrelationships among the various players in a market setting. The auditor is usually modeled as a mechanistic monitor; the output (report) of an auditor, and/or the act of hiring an auditor, is used by an informed party (e.g., an owner) to signal its private information (e.g., the firm's risk characteristics) to an uninformed party (e.g., an investor). In this paper we incorporate a utility-maximizing auditor, as found in agency models, into a simple signaling setting composed of firms of unobservable risk types requiring loans, lenders of capital to the firms, auditors, and a court system. We consider how litigation against auditors affects the prevailing equilibria as well as the resulting welfare of the different participants when the endogenously determined interest rates