This article examines the issue of cue weighting in judgment models used to represent human information processors. Illustrative results are presented which show that predictions produced by linear models are very robust with respect to alternative cue-weighting schemes unless the number of predictors included in the models is small, the mean correlation among the predictors is low, and the dispersion of the weights is large relative to their mean. Implications of these results for judgment modeling research in accounting are discussed. Generally, these implications concern the potential improvement in human decision making that might obtain from the search for alternative predictors and/or measurement methods rather than the search for improved methods of weighting predictors in linear models.
The National Automated Accounting Research System (NAARS) was developed through joint efforts of the AICPA and Mead Data Central, Inc. to provide accounting practitioners with computer-assisted capability for research of accounting and auditing problems. This paper describes the educational benefits, learning objectives, and instructional approach associated with providing auditing students at both the Bachelor's and Master's levels the opportunity to perform accounting and auditing research with NAARS.
The article focuses on the role and function of the "intermediate" course in the accounting curriculum. According to the author, an acceleration in the issuance by standard-setting bodies of highly specific and definitive accounting pronouncements has burdened intermediate textbooks and intermediate courses with what has come to be called legal accounting. The issue of what to do about "intermediate" accounting is confounded by discord over the relative weights to be assigned in the accounting curriculum to preparing students to pass the Uniform Certified Public Accountants Examination and preparing students for longer-term assignments in the profession. Accounting teachers have placed almost the entire burden of conveying the contents of the most controversial accounting pronouncements on the intermediate course that precious little time remains for acquainting students with a theory of the field which they are about to enter. One reaction to this predicament has been to expand intermediate from three semester hours to four, or from one course to two.