The article discusses the conflict of interest in auditing. The author relates that all publicly traded companies are required by law to hire a licensed auditor. It weakens the product market discipline that normally exists in the economy. In addition, the company gets to choose and pay its own...

On May 2-3, 2008, the Alberta School of Business and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Alberta (ICAA) sponsored a dinner and a one-day research workshop in Professor Michael Gibbins's honor. At the dinner on May 2, three presentations were made on the contribution of Professor Gibbins to...

The Financial Accounting Standards Committee of the American Accounting Association (the Committee) is charged with responding to requests for comments from standard-setters on issues related to financial reporting. The Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) released for public comment on...

Jamal and Sunder [Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 32 (1966) 273] showed that the median prices in double auctions populated by zero-intelligence (ZI) traders whose trading limits are set by two biased heuristics tend to converge to the same equilibrium as if their trading limits...

Government regulation of financial reporting by publicly listed firms, coupled with a punitive regime for violation of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), has been in place in the United States for seven decades. Whether this regime is effective or useful is an open question,...

Managers use smooth earnings patterns to communicate their firm's superior earnings prospects to investors. These managers require a knowledge of future earnings (or foresight) in order to determine the level of smoothing in each financial period. However, with discretion in GAAP, low foresight...

We present data on privacy practices in e-commerce under the European Union's (EU's) formal regulatory regime prevailing in the United Kingdom (U.K.), and compare it to the data from a previous study of United States (U.S.) practices that evolved in the absence of government laws or enforcement....

Under what conditions is government regulation better at protecting market participants than private, evolving, market-driven protections? An intriguing answer to that question emerges if we examine a relatively unregulated area of market participant protection: e-commerce privacy. In the United...

In this study, we address the question of what kinds of cognitive representations auditors use in a situation of potential financial statement fraud. We divide the problem of detecting fraud into two parts: detecting the frame management has constructed to mask the fraud, and detecting the...