Regulators and small audit firms allege that audit firm size does not affect audit quality and therefore should be irrelevant in the selection of an auditor. Contrary to this view, the current paper argues that audit quality is not independent of audit firm size, even when auditors initially possesses identical technological capabilities. In particular, when incumbent auditors earn client-specific quasi-rents, auditors with a greater number of clients have ‘more to lose’ by failing to report a discovered breach in a particular client's records. This collateral aspect increases the audit quality supplied by larger audit firms. The implications for some recent recommendations of the AICPA Special Committee on Small and Medium Sized Firms are developed

Consumer protection regulation has come under increasing fire from the Congress, courts, and the business community. In response, regulators have begun to innovate with market interventions that are more compatible with economic incentives. These incentive-compatible techniques include establishing property rights, mandating performance standards (instead of design standards), increasing competition, and encouraging and mandating information disclosure. Information disclosure allows consumer self-protection, compatible with individual preferences. Information is also compatible with sellers' incentives, inducing them to compete on the basis of information disclosed. In addition, this competition increases the incentive to generate and disseminate additional product information, thereby repeating the cycle. In this way, information remedies rely on private economic incentives to achieve regulatory goals, rather than on expensive direct enforcement by the regulator. Diagnosis of an information problem and evaluation of alternative remedies requires a number of steps: analysis of information production and distribution, identification of market failures and their implications for resource allocation in the information and product markets, and analysis of alternative remedies in light of these market failures