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The Accounting Review Vol. 62 No. 2 1987

Auditors' Covariation Judgments

William S. Waller; William L. Felix

Abstract

[When making audit judgments and decisions, an auditor often relies on knowledge or information about how task variables covary. Typically, an auditor generates this information without the aid of a formal covariation model. Thus, the quality of audit judgments and decisions which rely on covariation information may depend on an auditor's ability to judge covariation in a manner that is paramorphic to a formal model. This paper reports two experiments examining the rules by which auditors integrate joint frequency data when making covariation judgments and whether their judgments are affected by context, prior expectations, and amount of auditing experience. A main result was that the subjects generally used data-integration rules that were sensitive to the objective covariation level, but often overstated or understated this level. The effects of context, prior expectations, and amount of auditing experience were generally small.]

Volume
62
Issue
2
Pages
275-292
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib

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