Financial statement preparers often make accounting judgments with considerable uncertainty about what future accounting standards will require. We conduct a study in the experimental economics tradition to investigate how such uncertainty affects preparers’ current period accounting...

We test whether an impending change in the accounting for goodwill mitigates bias in the initial values that acquirers assign to intangible assets. Results of two experiments with experienced professional participants suggest that the new accounting alters, but does not eliminate, bias in...