A Within-Subjects Test of Expectancy Theory in a Public Accounting Environment
在公共会计环境中采用被试内设计检验期望理论，发现该设计比被试间设计更能解释注册会计师的动机和绩效，对审计领域的研究者和实践者有参考价值。
Expectancy theory (Vroom [1964]) has been employed to explain subjects' motivations, choices, actions, and performance. In audit settings, the model was used by Jiambalvo [1979] and Ferris [1977] to provide insights into the motivation and performance of CPAs. Although the results of these expectancy theory applications confirmed the authors' hypotheses, the models were tested in a between-subjects design instead of the within-subjects design, which is more consistent with expectancy theory's focus on individual choices. Given that Kopelman [1977] has provided empirical evidence of the enhanced explanatory power of a within-subjects approach (see also Kaplan [1984]), we investigated whether his results generalize to a public accounting environment. Our results are consistent with those reported by Kopelman [1977]. The methodology we employed is explained in section 2, and the results are reported in section 3. Section 4 contains our conclusions.