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10,1 Auditors’ going-concern
judgments: rigid, adaptive,
or both?
30
Andrew J. Rosman
University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine when auditors’ decision behavior is rigid and
adaptive in the going-concern judgment. Because rigid behavior has been found to produce
inappropriate outcomes, understanding when decision behavior is rigid or adaptive can lead to
improved decision making.
Design/methodology/approach – An experiment is conducted using cases based on real
companies to produce information search traces as dependent measures that are studied in the
ill-structured and structured parts of the going-concern task.
Findings – Auditors are adaptive in ill-structured tasks and rigid in structured tasks as predicted by
theory. Evidence of flawed decision making commonly found in studies of fixation and related concepts
was not found.
Research limitations/implications – The findings suggest the importance of explicitly
accounting for task structure when studying decision behavior in situated contexts. Future
research could assess whether task structure similarly impacts behavior in non-auditing contexts.
Practical implications – Researchers and practitioners have long been concerned about
inappropriate rigid behavior. This paper helps practitioners better understand when rigid or
adaptive behavior is likely to occur to improve decision making.
Originality/value – Taking a novel approach to reconcile two well established but conflicting bodies
of literature by focusing on “when” not “whether” people are rigid or adaptive, this paper resolves a
long-standing paradox. The implication for the literature is that reframing the question and directly
measuring behavior demonstrates that individuals are neither rigid nor adaptive, but can be both as
they follow behavior that is consistent with the demands of the task when the demands are defined in
terms of task structure.
Keywords Auditors, Decision making, Cognition, Individual behaviour, Going concern value
Paper type Research paper
I. Introduction
Research on fixation and related concepts in the cognitive and Gestalt psychology
literatures focuses on whether decision makers learn rigid decision behaviors
(i.e. persistently use a previously developed approach to solving a problem) or
adaptive decision behaviors (i.e. modify their decision processes to changes in
information), and generally find the former in accounting and other contexts (Ashton,
1976; Barnes and Webb, 1986; Bloom et al., 1984; Chang and Birnberg, 1977; Dearborn
and Simon, 1958). But, might experienced decision makers also learn adaptive
behaviors, and might some rigid behavior be appropriate? While the empirical evidence
Review of Accounting and Finance suggests otherwise, some question the research focus used to derive that evidence.
Vol. 10 No. 1, 2011
pp. 30-45 Gibbins and Jamal (1993, p. 453) observed that research “has led to theory development
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [. . .] of the persons who carry out a specific kind of task rather than a theory of the task
1475-7702
DOI 10.1108/14757701111113802 itself [. . .].” They, therefore, propose “shifting the focus more toward the task setting
to which they may adapt.” Similarly, others warn that research that fails to consider the Auditors’
environment or setting will miss important determinants of performance since going-concern
environmental factors affect motivation, knowledge, and ability (Libby and Luft, 1993).
One way to shift the focus from the individual to the task setting in which decision judgments
makers learn is to reframe the research question to ask what is it about novel (routine)
situations that would cause decision makers to learn to be adaptive (rigid) and when is
being adaptive (rigid) appropriate? In other words, rather than ask whether individuals’ 31
behavior is rigid or adaptive the question becomes under what conditions or when will
individuals learn to be rigid or adaptive? To investigate how task setting may affect how
rigid and adaptive behaviors are learned, this paper uses theories of situated cognition
and adaptive behavior to examine the role of task structure in determining rigid and
adaptive decision making by auditors in structured and ill-structured tasks.
Theories of situated cognition and adaptive learning are used to examine when
auditors learn rigid and adaptive behavior relative to changes in task structure that are
consistent with recommendations by situated cognition theorists (Elsbach et al., 2005) as
well as learning theorists who caution that:
[. . .] a theory of thinking and problem solving cannot predict behavior unless it encompasses
both an analysis of the structure of task environments and an analysis of the limits of rational
adaptation to the environment (Newell and Simon, 1972, p. 55).
Auditor judgment is well suited in this study because it is learned through formal
training and by accumulating on-the-job “situated” experiences working in small groups
(i.e. audit teams). The distinctive two-stage going-concern judgment is an ideal task for
studying adaptive and rigid behavior because of the way the stages are structured. The
first stage (evaluation) is “ill-structured”: auditors are not restricted in the type of
information acquisition they engage into evaluate whether they have substantial doubt,
but rather can freely apply intuition based on experience to adapt information
acquisition. Should they express substantial doubt, they proceed with the second stage
(audit opinion), which is “well structured.” Here, auditing standards require that
auditors rigidly follow specific rules that restrict their decision making, even limiting the
type of information that they can consider in rendering their final judgment.
I find that auditors were adaptive in the ill-structured component of the going-concern
task and rigid in the well-structured component. The implication for the literature is that
reframing the question and directly measuring behavior demonstrates that individuals
are neither rigid nor adaptive, but can be both as they follow behavior that is consistent
with the demands of the task when the demands are defined in terms of task structure.
The next section summarizes the two competing literatures on rigidity and adaptive
behavior and discusses how each relates to task structure. Section III describes situated
cognition as a framework within which rigid and adaptive behavior can be better
understood. Section IV provides a task analysis of the two-stage going-concern
judgment and develops hypotheses. Section V describes the experiment. The results of
the experiment and related statistical analysis are presented in Section VI. Finally,
Section VII offers a discussion of results and concluding observations.
V. Experiment
Sample and task description
The sample consists of 23 auditors from international accounting firms who had
attained the status of senior or manager to help ensure that each had expertise with the
going-concern task. The experiment required about 60 minutes to complete and was
presented in the field via search monitor, which is menu-driven software well suited for
investigating information acquisition because it unobtrusively and completely records
all information acquired by the user (Biggs et al., 1993).
The experiment included data from six companies that were extracted from
public documents. Using real companies was intended to help ensure external validity,
although fictitious names were used. Case order was varied across participants to
minimize an order effect. Each session began with a practice session to allow
participants to become familiar with the task.
Each case began with a description of the company. The second screen listed ten
categories of information and then requested the selection of one category. Auditors
could select from five categories of financial information (profitability, liquidity,
financial leverage, inventory turnover, and capital intensity). Each measure had three
RAF years of data. Seven pieces of strategic information were also available (e.g. biographies
10,1 of the president/CEO, senior vice presidents, and vice presidents; market demand;
competition; description of products; and description of any patents) consistent with
studies that have shown the importance of non-financial information in going-concern
judgments (Parker et al., 2005).
Because auditors proceed to the opinion stage of the going-concern task and seek
additional information only when they conclude in the evaluation stage that there is
substantial doubt about the entity’s viability, the within-subject analysis used in the
opinion stage is performed on a reduced set of participants (i.e. those who expressed
substantial doubt in the evaluation stage). In contrast, the within-subject analysis used
in the evaluation stage is performed for all participants.
Measures in the second stage are constructed to be similar to those in the first stage.
The opinion stage measure similar to amount of information acquired in the evaluation
stage is the number or amount of mitigating factors identified by participants.
The opinion stage measures similar to “sameness” measures in the evaluation stage
are based on the characteristics of the mitigating factors identified previously in SAS 59:
financial, strategic, past, future, consistent with or not consistent with SAS 59.
The calculation of the sameness measures in the opinion stage is similar for the opinion
stage (see the illustration in the Appendix 2). In sum, there are four measures of rigidity
in the evaluation stage (amount and same for financial and strategic) and seven
measures of rigidity in the opinion stage.
VI. Results
Table I presents the within-subject results of the paired t-tests that address H1 for the
ill-structured evaluation stage. H1 states that auditors will exhibit adaptive behavior in
this stage of the going-concern task because the ill-structured nature of this task lends
itself to adaptive behavior. Each t-test analyzes whether the difference in the means is
statistically different from zero. Statistically significant differences provide evidence of
adaptive behavior.
n Mean difference SE t pa
n Mean difference SE t pa
Notes
1. The paper has described the going-concern judgment task using terminology and procedures
consistent with generally accepted auditing standards (GAAS) in the USA because the
participants in this study are auditors in the USA who follow these standards. A review of the
comparable international standards (IFAC, 2009) describes essentially the same stages as
under US standards. For example, in paragraph 16 of ISA 570, the standard discusses what the
auditor should do once events or conditions are found that “may cast significant doubt on the
entity’s ability to continue as a going concern” including the evaluation of mitigating factors.
That is, like US GAAS, ISA 570 specifically considers two stages, one in which substantial
doubt is identified and a subsequent stage in which the event of condition that raised doubt is
then investigated to see if it can be mitigated.
2. This study is interested in differences in acquisition behavior across the companies rather
than in the direction of differences. Therefore, the absolute value of the difference scores is
used since it does not matter whether a higher or lower amount of information was acquired Auditors’
for company one compared with company two, but rather what matters is only that
a difference occurred. A non-zero score for any of the two “amount” measures implies that the going-concern
auditor demonstrated non-rigidity (flexibility) in the acquisition of information for the two judgments
companies in the experiment.
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RAF Further reading
10,1 Abdolmohammadi, M. and Wright, A. (1987), “An examination of the effects of experience and
task complexity on audit judgments”, The Accounting Review, Vol. 62, pp. 1-13.
Arunachalam, V. and Beck, G. (2002), “Functional fixation revisited: the effects of feedback and a
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change”, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 27 Nos 1/2, pp. 1-25.
44 Cook, T.D. and Campbell, D.T. (1979), Quasi-experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues for
Field Settings, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA.
Spilker, B.C. and Prawitt, D.F. (1997), “Adaptive responses to time pressure: the effects of experience
on tax information search behavior”, Behavioral Research in Accounting, Vol. 9, pp. 172-98.
1. Profitability 0 1 21 1
2. Liquidity 1 1 0 0
3. Financial leverage 1 0 1 1
4. Inventory turnover 0 0 0 0
5. Capital intensity 0 1 21 1
Table AI. Total 3