Auditors’ Liability to Lenders and Auditor Conservatism
研究了近合同关系规则下审计师法律责任增加对其努力选择的影响，发现审计师会提高信息性和保守性努力，但保守性努力对股东预期收益有负面溢出效应。
We examine the near-privity rule that increases the auditor’s legal liability exposure by considering a debtholder who can sue the auditor and recover damages when there is an audit failure. We show that the increase in the auditor’s legal liability induces the auditor to choose more informative and more conservative efforts. Although the increased informative effort has a favorable spillover effect that increases the equityholder’s expected payoff, the increased conservative effort induces a bias—that is, decreases the likelihood of reporting a true good state as good—and thus induces an adverse spillover effect that decreases the equityholder’s expected payoff. As such, when the conservative effort bias is small, the favorable spillover effect dominates the adverse spillover effect, and the equityholder prefers the near-privity regime. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.