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to the Table of ContentsCynthia Williams Turner was presented with the Outstanding Dissertation Award during the Sectionís luncheon at the AAA annual meeting in Chicago. Cynthia received her Ph.D. from the Ohio State University and is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Turner's dissertation is titled Judgment-Versus-Choice, Accountability Demands and the Auditorís Evidence Search Strategy. The study examines how the nature of the task (judgment versus choice) and the presence of accountability demands influence auditorsí decision strategies. Recent work in decision-making literature suggests that judgment and choice are not equivalent tasks. This work suggests that judgment, when compared to choice, is characterized to take more time and be more cognitively demanding. Recent work in the audit judgment literature suggests that the influence of accountability demands on the auditor's search strategy likely depends, at least in part, on the perceived preferences of the individual to whom the auditor is accountable. In Professor Turnerís study, 80 auditor participants completed two audit tasks, an accounts receivable collectability review and an inventory obsolescence review. Auditors were randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions created by crossing three levels of accountability (no accountability, credence-inducing and skepticism-inducing) and two levels of response tasks (judgment and choice). Credence-inducing preferences are characterized as preferences of a reviewing manager who is concerned with auditors who undertake, without adequate justification, costly investigations of unusual account balance fluctuations. Skepticism-inducing preferences are characterized as preferences of a reviewing manager who is concerned with auditors who accept, without adequate justification, client-provided explanations of unusual account balance fluctuations. The results of the study indicate that auditors who make judgments evaluate more evidence and expend more time than those who make choices. Further, auditors who are held accountable to a reviewer who possesses skepticism-inducing preferences evaluate more evidence and follow a more exhaustive search strategy than those who are not. Professor Turner's findings suggest that (1) care must be exercised when generalizing the results of research studies that use judgments to investigate choice-like tasks, and (2) accountability mechanisms such as the audit review process may not always be bias mitigators, but possible bias instigators.
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