Experimental Research and the Distinctive Features of Accounting Settings

Abstract

This chapter will examine major changes that have taken place in the experimental literature since the early 1980s and will use this as a point of departure to discuss future directions. Specifically, it will concentrate on two categories of research that have taken directions different from the earlier work discussed in Nick Dopuch’s (1990) review: studies of the effects of knowledge and examinations of the impact of incentives and markets. In addition, studies of the effects of other environmental attributes of accounting settings will be discussed briefly. This chapter also limits its scope to those topics normally considered to be part of human information processing or behavioral decision theory research and work in experimental economics, which directly relates to human information processing issues. This results in the exclusion of a great deal of important research.

This paper was presented at the University of Illinois Golden Jubilee Symposium, June 1990, and is reprinted from The State of Accounting as We Enter the 1990’s with permission of the author and the University of Illinois.

The author would like to thank Vic Bernard, Rob Bloomfield, Jon Davis, Nick Dopuch, Marlys Lipe, Joan Luft, Ira Solomon, and Dick Thaler for their helpful comments.