We report the results of four experiments investigating the relationship between (1) the quality of an audit, (2) jurors' assessments of the standard of prudent care (SOC) against which audit quality is compared, and (3) jurors' negligence verdicts. Experiment 1 operationalizes audit quality by varying the sample size used in audit testing, and provides evidence that jurors anchor their assessment of SOC on audit quality, producing a “competitive mediation” in which audit quality reduces the potential for a negligence verdict directly, but increases that potential indirectly by increasing SOC. Experiment 2 generalizes this finding to a setting that operationalizes audit quality by varying the size of adjustment the auditor required. Experiments 3 and 4 extend these results to a setting in which SOC is elicited after jurors make negligence verdicts. Overall, these experiments provide insight into the role of SOC in constraining and justifying negligence verdicts. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

Prior literature suggests that investors react less strongly to information in less readable disclosures. We extend this literature by considering how disclosure readability affects the sensitivity of investors' valuation judgments to the information contained in outside (i.e., non-firm) sources of information. Using an experiment, we present investors with a disclosure containing mixed news about the valence of firm performance, and this disclosure varies in readability. We find that investors who initially view a less readable firm disclosure provide valuation judgments that incorporate the outside information to a greater extent, such that their valuation judgments are more sensitive to whether outside information is relatively more or less supportive of management's positive forward-looking statements. We find evidence that this occurs primarily because investors who view a less readable initial disclosure feel less comfortable evaluating the firm and, in turn, rely more on the outside information. We also find that viewing a less readable firm disclosure indirectly increases the extent to which participants search outside information. Combined, our results suggest that investors' valuation judgments may be more influenced by outside sources of information when managers provide less readable firm disclosures, potentially limiting the extent to which managers can benefit from strategically issuing less readable disclosures to obfuscate poor performance. These findings also imply that investors might over-rely on more readable disclosures while discounting outside sources of information about the firm. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

Commonly used Jones-type discretionary accrual models applied in quarterly settings do not adequately control for nondiscretionary accruals that naturally occur due to firm growth. We show that the relation between quarterly accruals and backward-looking sales growth (measured over a rolling four-quarter window) and forward-looking firm growth (market-to-book ratio) is non-linear. Failure to control for the effects of firm growth and performance on innate accruals leads to excessive Type I error rates in tests of earnings management. We propose simple refinements to Jones-type models that deal with non-linear growth and performance effects and show that the expanded models are well-specified and exhibit high power in quarterly settings where one is testing for earnings management. The expanded models are able to identify the presence of earnings management in a sample of restatement firms. Our findings have important implications for the use of discretionary accrual models in earnings management research.

In this study, we examine how information foraging by auditors affects audit evidence collection in two distinct contexts, and show how a small change to audit methodology mitigates the potentially harmful effects of foraging. Information Foraging Theory explains how, while navigating an information environment, individuals learn to acquire information through personally experiencing the costs incurred and the values obtained from information. Consistent with the theory, we find that auditors react to the immediately felt costs of information collection (e.g., time and effort) at the expense of a more global consideration of information value (i.e., auditors collect lower-quality audit evidence). However, foraging behavior is moderated by removing the personal cost to the individual auditor (identifying audit evidence for another member of the audit team to collect), further demonstrating that these personally felt costs influence auditor choices in a way that reduces the quality of information collected. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating how information foraging can influence evidence quality and, thus, audit quality, and how a slight alteration of audit methodology can mitigate this behavior.