We argue that the market for audit services closely resembles a common value procurement (seller's) auction, where auditors generate a private estimate of the actual cost of an audit engagement prior to quoting the client a price. Thus, we conduct a systematic examination of audit pricing and...

Hannan, Rankin, and Towry (2006, HRT hereafter) propose that an information system is capable of affecting honesty in the manager's budget report by reducing information asymmetry between the manager and the owner regarding the level of honesty in the budget. They find that going from no...

In agency theory, offering a flat salary contract under unobservable effort creates a moral hazard problem because the agent is motivated to shirk and provide less than a previously agreed-upon level of effort. We examine a moral solution to this moral hazard problem. In particular, we present a...

This study reports the results of two experiments that re-examine how preferences for honesty affect managers' excessive consumption of firm resources. In our investor-manager investment game, if the investor chooses to invest, the manager privately observes production costs, chooses his or her...

Policy makers and corporations have recently emphasized a code of ethics as an effective aspect of corporate governance. The corporate governance literature in accounting, however, provides little empirical or theoretical support for this emphasis. We address this gap between public policy and...

For decades, the economic theory of the firm referred to as agency theory has dominated business research and education in the United States. Although agency theory has been influential in accounting, finance, and managerial economics, it lacks informal and nonfinancial controls. Douglas E....

This paper presents a model that relates properties of the analysts' information environment to the properties of their forecasts. First, we express forecast dispersion and error in the mean forecast in terms of analyst uncertainty and consensus (that is, the degree to which analysts share a...

This study investigates determinants of budgetary slack using the framework of agency theory and the methods of experimental economics. A computerized, five-period experiment is designed to test the robustness of prior experimental results documenting budgeting behavior inconsistent with...

In this paper we model return-earnings regressions in a setting in which analysts' forecasts are used to proxy for investors' expectations. We show how disparites between investors' and analysts' information sets could affect the regression coefficients and the R2. Our findings provide new and...