An Attribution Analysis of Responsibility Assessment for Audit Performance
通过模拟诉讼场景，测试注册会计师与企业主在评估审计师责任时是否使用不同的归因模型，发现注册会计师更少将责任归于审计师，且信息处理差异是原因之一。
This paper reports on an investigation of whether CPAs and business owners employ different attributional models in evaluating the performance of auditors. Through a series of repeated-measures scenarios which described litigation against auditors, we tested for differences between the two groups of subjects in the degree of responsibility attributed to the auditor. Three treatment effects within each scenario involved information about the commonness of the procedures that the auditor employed (procedural consensus), the frequency with which the described auditor had been involved in litigation in the past (indicating consistency of reputable performance over time), and the commonness of the type of audit task described in the scenario (task distinctiveness). These three types of information were suggested by the theoretical work of Heider [1958] and Kelley [1967], but were operationalized in a manner appropriate to the auditing context. Results indicate that CPAs were less likely than business owners to attribute responsibility to auditors for the described, litigious outcomes. While this result is hardly surprising given differences in motivational incentives of the two groups, we also found that information-processing differences contributed to the results. Thus, the problem of differences between the public' expects and what auditors can and should reasonably expect to accomplish in their audits