In this study, we examine whether interacting hierarchical teams outperform nominal hierarchical teams in electronic brainstorming. Our hierarchical audit teams were composed of 111 managers and seniors from two Big 4 accounting firms. We compare fraud brainstorming outcomes between nominal and interacting teams for two tasks of varying complexity: a simpler task of fraud risk factor identification and a more complex task of fraud hypothesis generation. We find that nominal teams generate a significantly larger number of unique fraud risk factors and fraud hypotheses than interacting teams. Nominal teams also generate higher-quality fraud hypotheses. We provide evidence that social loafing by less experienced auditors in interacting teams drives the differences between nominal and interacting teams in the fraud hypothesis generation task. In addition, less experienced auditors have less developed mental simulations for frauds in interacting teams compared to those in nominal teams. A key contribution of our study is that it identifies the underlying mechanisms of the differential fraud brainstorming outcomes between nominal and interacting teams.

This paper empirically examines the interactive effect of competition intensity and competition type on the use of customer satisfaction measures in executives' annual bonus contracts. Specifically, we predict a stronger association between competition intensity in an industry and the use of customer satisfaction measures in executives' annual bonus contracts when the competition is non-price-based than when the competition is price-based. Using hand-collected data from Standard & Poor's (S&P) 1500 firms' disclosures of the use of customer satisfaction measures in executive bonus contracts in 2006 and 2010 proxy statements, we find results consistent with our prediction. Our results are robust to alternative measures of competition type and competition intensity. We also find similar results when we use the weight on customer satisfaction measures in executive bonus contracts as the dependent variable. Our study extends the literature on the effect of competition on the design of managerial incentives by distinguishing between competition intensity and competition type, and providing the first large-sample empirical evidence on the joint effect of these two dimensions of competition on the incentive use of an important nonfinancial performance measure. Data Availability: Data used in this study are obtained from publicly available sources.