Auditor Mindsets and Audits of Complex Estimates

Auditors experience significant problems auditing complex accounting estimates, and this increasingly puts financial reporting quality at risk. Based on analyses of the specific errors that auditors commit, we propose that auditors need to be able to think more broadly and incorporate information from a variety of sources in order to improve audit quality for these important accounts. We experimentally demonstrate that a deliberative mindset intervention improves auditors’ ability to identify unreasonable estimates by improving their ability to identify and incorporate into their analyses contradictory information from diverse parts of the audit and improving their ability to think critically about the evidence. We perform additional analyses to demonstrate that our intervention improves auditor performance by causing them to think differently rather than simply to work harder. We demonstrate that critical thinking can improve the identification of unreasonable estimates and, in doing so, we provide new directions for addressing audit quality issues.     

将财务化繁为简

研究显示:有害的复杂性会为组织带来约10.2%的利润损失。因此,有必要现在就审查一下你所在企业的财务部和整个组织,看看是否可以通过降低复杂性来减少损失。在绝大多数企业中,财务部门处于复杂的系统和流程网络的中心,贯穿从财务报告一直到业绩管理。     

WHY ARE AMERICANS ADDICTED TO BASEBALL? AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF FANDOM IN KOREA AND THE UNITED STATES

Theories of rational addiction posit that certain habit-forming goods—characterized by an increasing marginal utility of consumption—generate predictable dynamic patterns of consumer behavior. It has been suggested that attendance at sporting events represents an example of such a good, as evidenced by the pricing strategies of commercial sports interests. In this essay, we provide new evidence in support of rational addiction for the case of Major League Baseball but fail to find such support in data from the Korean Professional Baseball League. We then review the scientific literature on sports fans from the perspective of human behavioral ecology and propose a theory of endogenous habit formation among sports fans that could explain our findings . ( JEL C32, D83, D87, D91, L83)     

有限理性、异质预期与房价内生演化机制

本文通过将传统蛛网模型推广为双边异质预期蛛网模型,分析了房价的内生演化机制,通过数值分析考察了市场参与者心理预期对房价的影响。结论表明,市场中基本面分析者的预期不影响房价动态系统的稳定性,技术分析者与开发商的预期则导致房价波动,进而影响房价动态系统的稳定性。模型还给出了房地产开发成本对房价动态演化的影响。开发成本不仅对基本面价格有正向冲击,而且当成本增加到一定临界值后也将导致房价演化出现分岔。