Experience Effects in Auditing: The Role of Task-Specific Knowledge

Previous studies concerning experience effects in audit judgments have produced mixed results, possibly because they did not consider the knowledge necessary to complete the task and when it would normally be acquired. Further, many studies did not view the global judgment process as consisting of several components, e.g., cue selection. Task-specific knowledge may aid the performance of experienced auditors more in some components than in others. Not considering task-specific knowledge or viewing the judgment process as being comprised of components may have led to certain problems in generalizing the results of these studies to other auditing tasks. Those problems are addressed in the design of this study, which examines experience effects, specifically the role of taskspecific knowledge, in the cue selection and cue weighting components of two audit tasks, analytical risk assessment and control risk assessment. Results indicate that task-specific knowledge aided the performance of experienced auditors in both the cue selection and cue weighting components only in analytical risk assessment. M j ~EASUREMENT of audit judgment performance is often difficult because there are no objective performance criteria for many audit tasks. As a result, the judgments of experienced auditors have been used as a substitute for other performance measures in determining firm policies and auditing standards. To determine the validity of this criterion, more evidence is needed This paper is based on my dissertation at The University of Michigan. I appreciate the assistance of my committee members: Robert Libby, Anant Kshirsagar, Frank Yates, and David Wright. I particularly appreciate the comments and support of my chairman, Robert Libby. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for comments on this version of the paper, as well as the following persons for comments on earlier versions: Matt Anderson, David Frederick, Ed Joyce, Barry Lewis, Bill Waller, and Mark Young. Financial support was provided by Deloitte Haskins & Sells and The University of Michigan. Manuscript received October 1988. Revisions received March 1989 and July 1989. Accepted August 1989.