The office of scientific integrity investigations: The importance of data analysis

Certified Public Accountants serve as independent auditors of financial statements. They perform information‐integrity testing for the economy and society, adding creditability to financial statements prepared by organizations’ management. Investors, creditors, and others rely on these financial statements and the audit report to make business decisions. Auditing work involves gathering evidence (research) and forming an opinion (reporting results) about the “fairness”; of financial statements according to regulatory, legal, and professional rules. As researchers, auditors are subject to a complex network of mechanisms to promote accountability in their work. These mechanisms exist at environmental, professional, and audit‐firm levels. They combine to influence the judgments of individual auditors.     

Gambling Reputation: Repeated Bargaining With Outside Options

We study the role of incomplete information and outside options in determining bargaining postures and surplus division in repeated bargaining between a long‐run player and a sequence of short‐run players. The outside option is not only a disagreement point, but reveals information privately held by the long‐run player. In equilibrium, the uninformed short‐run players' offers do not always respond to changes in reputation and the informed long‐run player's payoffs are discontinuous. The long‐run player invokes inefficient random outside options repeatedly to build reputation to a level where the subsequent short‐run players succumb to his extraction of a larger payoff, but he also runs the risk of losing reputation and relinquishing bargaining power. We investigate equilibrium properties when the discount factor goes to 1 and when the informativeness of outside options diffuses. In both cases, bargaining outcomes become more inefficient and the limit reputation‐building probabilities are interior.     

签字审计师搭档异质性特征与审计意见研究——基于媒体报道利用视角

媒体报道对审计行为的影响已成为近年的研究热点。既有研究多将两位签字审计师视作一个整体,忽视了二者在媒体报道获取和认知能力方面存在差异的客观实际。基于有限关注理论和高阶梯队理论,探究了签字审计师搭档异质性特征在关注和利用媒体报道中的作用,发现签字审计师搭档异质性特征能够显著弱化正面报道对审计意见的影响,并提高了出具非标准审计意见的可能性。区分签字审计师搭档与客户是否存在亲密关系后发现,具有异质性特征的签字审计师搭档能够显著弱化客户亲密关系对出具非标准审计意见的影响,非标准审计意见被出具的概率得以提高。因此,审计项目组、会计师事务所和监管部门应当充分考虑签字审计师搭档的职位和专业背景等异质性特征,合理配置审计师资源,形成更符合审计执业需求的人力资本结构。     

媒体参与下群体性突发事件的演化博弈

借助演化经济学研究工具,考虑媒体参与对群体行为的影响,构建包括媒体敏感因子、声誉损失和冲突处置成本等参数在内的群体性突发事件演化博弈模型,并对群体策略选择进行演化动态稳定性分析,通过数值仿真方法分析决策参数的不同取值和初始条件的改变对演化结果的影响及其演化路径。结果表明：媒体敏感因子和声誉损失是影响群体性突发事件动态演化的关键因素,媒体敏感因子和声誉损失较高时,无论是强势群体还是弱势群体,都会选择合作策略,协商解决利益分配问题。政府应充分利用和发挥媒体监督职能对群体策略选择的引导作用,促使群体性突发事件跳出“不良锁定”状态,朝着理想状态演化。     

Does severity matter?: An investigation of crisis severity from defensive attribution theory perspective

Although the concept of crisis severity has existed in the crisis communication literature for two decades, it has not been theoretically tested and explained. Based on Defensive Attribution Theory (DAT), this study intends to specify the relationship between crisis severity and crisis responsibility as well as organizational reputation within the SCCT model. Through a 2 (crisis severity) × 3 (crisis type) between-subject factorial experiment (n?=?274), the study revealed that higher crisis severity causes worse reputation regardless of crisis type. For accidental crisis, higher crisis severity leads to higher intentionality, one dimension of crisis responsibility. The findings indicate that crisis severity still has value in SCCT and deserves further investigation.     

The roles of supply network centralities in firm performance and the moderating effects of reputation and export-orientation

Abstract

This study explores how supply network degree, closeness, and betweenness centralities affect firm performance, and the moderating effects of organizational reputation (measured by PageRank centrality) and export-orientation. The supply chain relationship empirical data are drawn from manufacturing and manufacturing service companies in Hong Kong, China. Social network analysis and moderated regression analysis were adopted to test the hypotheses for a sample of 814 focal firms with 3086 supply chain ties. The results indicate that in-degree and closeness centralities improve firm performance. Reputation is found to positively moderate the relationship between closeness and sales performance, but negatively moderates the relationship between betweenness and sales performance. Export-orientation has no effect on relationships. This study contributes to the literature by providing additional empirical evidence on the role of supply network position in firm performance. It also introduces PageRank centrality as a new measure of organizational reputation in a supply network.     

Morality rules: Understanding the role of prior reputation in consequences of scansis

A favorable reputation casts positive influences over organizations’ short- and long-term development, which can be especially important when organizations grapple with unpredictable challenges such as organizational crises. Yet, keeping a good track record might also backfire to cause more reputational damages, which is often observed when organizations deal with value-oriented moral crises. Against this backdrop, drawing from the literature on crisis communication and moral psychology, we situated our study in the scansis context, a particular type of morality-focused negative situation featuring characteristics of both crisis and scandal, and explored effects of prior reputation on people’s responses to an organizational scansis. Through an online experiment (N = 293), we found severe backlash towards the scansis-stricken organization in both the control condition (i.e., no indication of reputation) and the good reputation condition, whereas such prominent difference was not observed in the bad reputation condition. The findings thus implicated the need to take the unique role of morality in scansis into account in both pertinent research and practice.     

问答社区知识传播者网络声望、行动相似度与知识传播效果

基于社会交换理论和趋同理论等,构建问答社区知识传播者关注关系网络声望、传播者行动相似度和知识传播效果三者之间的相互作用关系,并通过含滞后项的联立方程组模型对上述关系进行实证分析,挖掘问答社区内知识传播的影响机制。研究表明:知识传播者关注关系网络声望和知识传播效果之间存在着相互促进作用;知识传播者的行动相似度对传播者关注关系网络声望有正向影响;知识传播环境特征和知识内容丰富度对知识的传播效果有正向影响;在特定话题下,知识内容丰富度在知识传播者关注关系网络声望对知识传播效果影响中起负向调节作用。     

消费信任发生机制探索——一项基于中国本土的实证研究

信任是促进消费者购买的关键因素之一。本研究在梳理以信任为研究主题的文献基础上,对消费信任的发生机制进行探索,编制了消费信任发生机制的量表,并运用此量表调查了中国7个省市和地区的529名消费者,采用结构方程模型检验消费信任的发生机制模型。结果表明,声望和理性计算结果对消费信任的产生具有重要影响,消费者做决策时对刻板印象的偏好及其对商家的认同也对消费信任具有显著影响。     

超额商誉、审计师行业专长与商誉减值

以2014—2016年并购事件为样本,研究发现超额商誉与自并购时点起三年内商誉减值的总额显著正相关。当作为并购中介的会计师事务所标的资产所在行业具有行业专长时,能够对超额商誉与短期内商誉减值的关系起到抑制作用。进一步研究发现,在非跨行业并购及关联并购中,审计师行业专长的抑制作用更加显著。丰富了商誉与并购中介相关研究,为并购方理解超额商誉的经济后果及会计师事务所的聘用价值提供了经验证据。