We address the following overarching questions: What kind of accountability framework could regulators use to (a) motivate auditors to improve audit quality, and (b) evaluate how well auditors have carried out their duties? We draw on research in accounting, economics, psychology, and...

I develop a framework that elucidates how the primary target of auditors’ professional skepticism – audit evidence or their own judgment and decision making – interacts with other factors to affect auditors’ professional judgments. As an initial test of the framework, I conduct an...

This paper addresses auditors? hypothesis testing during diagnostic inference. Cognitive steps involved in diagnostic inference include mental-representation formation, hypothesis generation, and hypothesis testing (Einhorn [1976]). Hypothesis testing can be decomposed further into specifying...