Audit Market Segmentation – The Impact of Mid-tier Firms on Competition
研究了中型审计师对竞争和平均审计质量的影响，发现审计师根据客户复杂性调整质量，中型事务所有时提高平均质量，有时不能，对监管机构有参考价值。
This analysis’ goal is to characterise the impact of mid-tier auditors on competition and average supplied audit quality. The major result of our analysis is the following: Auditors’ flexibilities with respect to clients’ complexity determine the offered audit quality levels and thus the average supplied audit quality. Defining a model-endogenous quality measure, we show that for some instances the mid-tier auditor improves average audit quality, but for other instances fails to do so. The result could be of special interest for standard setters, for example, the European Commission, which is currently revising EU audit regulation. Further, the analysis may serve as an instrument to analyse economic consequences of future changes of regulation.