Knowledge that Transforms

Auditing, Audit experience, Memory errors

Auditing, Auditor change, Public sector, Audit quality

This paper shows that the positive effects on decision making of financial incentives, performance feedback, and the requirement to justify one's decisions to others can be undermined or even reversed by the availability of a decision aid. More specifically, in the absence of a decision aid, subjects achieved greater classification accuracy in a repetitive decision task when a monetary incentive was offered, or when feedback about past performance was provided, or when they were required to justify their choices, relative to the absence of these three variables. In contrast, when a statistically valid decision aid was available, the same incentive, feedback, and justification requirements resulted in lower classification accuracy, again relative to the absence of these three variables. These results are interpreted within a framework having two basic tenets. First, financial incentives, performance feedback, and a justifi-

Unexpected earnings, Intraindustry information transfers, Disclosures, Market reaction

Auditing, Audit fees, Auditor Low balling, Auditor change

Auditing, Financial statement errors, Auditor experience, Decision making

In this paper, the authors study a general concave discrete-time, infinite-horizon, optimal-control problem. They establish necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality in the weak sense of W. A. Brock and for optimality in the strong sense of D. Gale. The corresponding transversality conditions are general exhaustion properties of the limit value of the optimal state variables; these properties cover and extend the well-known results obtained in special cases. Copyright 1990 by The Econometric Society.

This paper proposes a characterization of optimal strategies for playing certain repeated coordination games whose players have identical preferences. Players' optimal coordination strategies reflect their uncertainty about how their partners will respond to multiple-equilibrium problems; this uncertainty constrains the statistical relationships between their strategy choices players can bring about. The authors show that optimality is nevertheless consistent with subgame-perfect equilibrium. Examples are analyzed in which players use precedents as focal points to achieve and maintain coordination, and in which they play dominated strategies with positive probability in early stages in the hope of generating a useful precedent. Copyright 1990 by The Econometric Society.

In this paper, the feasibility of estimating a Nash labor market equilibrium model using only information on workers is demonstrated. The equilibrium model, adapted from Albrecht and Axell (1984), is based on workers who are homogenous in terms of market productivity and heterogeneous in terms of nonmarket productivity, and on firms that are heterogeneous in terms of productive efficiency. The equilibrium model is contrasted with an unrestricted version of the model in terms of its fit to the data. Copyright 1990 by The Econometric Society.