The Accounting Review Vol. 71 No. 2 1996
Using Decision Aids to Improve Auditors' Conditional Probability Judgments
Abstract
[Prior research indicates that auditors encounter difficulty in applying experienced error frequencies to judgments of the probability that an audit objective is violated given a particular transaction cycle. This difficulty may occur because of a mismatch between the organization of this particular judgment task and the organization of auditors' knowledge. We test the effectiveness of two decision aids at counteracting this difficulty: (1) a checklist aid which facilitates knowledge retrieval and (2) a decomposition-and-mechanical-aggregation aid which facilitates both knowledge retrieval and aggregation. The checklist aid slightly improved the degree to which auditors' judgments reflected experienced frequencies and the mechanical-aggregation aid greatly improved auditors' judgments, completely counteracting the effect of the task organization-knowledge organization mismatch.]
- Volume
- 71
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 221-240
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib