| With the development of Auditing, the interdisciplinary research has raised the attentions of many scholars in recent years. As a result, Behavioral Auditing, which combines Behavioral Decision theory with Auditing, has achieved a high speed of development. It is certain that Behavioral Decision and Auditing are connected. As a decision maker, who should face with a lot of judgments, the auditor should make right decisions depending on the professional judgment, contributing to the appropriate audit opinion. To improve the audit quality, it is necessary to pay attention to the factors which affect the decision makers.However, researches on the behavioral auditing are still not enough. The research contents and the methods are still conditioned in the traditional way. The developing research has more rich contents and prefers novel methodology, which reveals their interests in interdisciplinary research and experimental research method.Perceived self-efficacy or sense of self efficacy, a concept from Psychology, defines the attitude of a person to confront the challenges and defeat the setbacks. With a high level of self efficacy, the one is confident to regard several pressures in his work and life. From the perspective of Behavioral Decision, the confidence of the decision maker is a key factor to affect the judgment and decision.Group decision making is regarded as a way to fix the limitation of the bounded rationality, which has been the topic of many researchers for a long time. Even though the history of group decision theory is long, the auditing researchers have little attention to this area.As a traditional research subject, the audit risk assessment has been researched in marvelous papers. However, it is rich in the macro perspective, such as industry expertise, audit quality, and the quality of financial and accounting information, while the papers are limited on the individual auditors. In fact, apparently, the accounting firm takes responsibility of the audit risk, but the ultimate consequence is delivered to the individual auditor.This research takes two perspectives, both the individual auditor and the audit program team, to make a difference between the individual characters and the group organization. In order to shed lights on the risk assessment process, this dissertation takes two dimensions to measure the risk attitude of the decision maker, and combines the risk assessment decision with the characters of both the individual and the group. On the one hand, this dissertation targets the individual character by psychological perspective, to discuss the effect of the psychological character of the individual on the audit risk assessment. On the other hand, this dissertation tries to explain whether the group decision making can significantly improve the audit risk assessment quality, which is classified by the group organization and group rules.The main contents in this dissertation can be explained in several points.To begin with, the risk attitude of the auditor has the direct effect on the result of audit risk assessment.Audit risk assessment is among the primary subject of this dissertation. The result of the audit risk assessment will immediately affect the application of the audit risk assessment model, and ultimately delivers to design of the audit procedures and the audit opinion. Lowering the risks of material misstatement of the financial statements is definitely one of the main reasons of the increasing audit risk for the industry. The risk attitude can be explained as follows:On the one hand, the risk acceptability can be understood by risk appetite. If the auditors prefer high risk, which is risk preference, he may accept audit program of high risk. The result can be inappropriately increasing the audit risk.On the other hand, the risk identification capability reveals the reaction from the auditors when he faces the risk unfavorably changing. If the risk is indicated to increase dramatically and the auditors cannot identify the situation, it is known that the auditor is lack of professional competence and due attention.Second, an experiment is applied in this dissertation as the prime research methodology. The experimental method can close to the real behavioral decision maker and control the noise and the environment, which contributes to the reliable results. Besides, this dissertation targets the decision makers individual characters and organizational characteristics, which highlights that the subjects in the experiment must follow the decision making law and discipline. As a result, this research makes the third grade undergraduates, majoring in accounting, auditing and financial management, as the subjects of this experiment. This research concludes two experiments. SPSS.19is applied in the analysis of the data and results.Third, this research explains three primary questions:Firstly, the self efficacy can affect the audit risk assessment. It is revealed that the high self efficacy is connected with the risk preference, which encourages the auditors to receive the audit program with the high risk.Secondly, the audit team’s group organization has a significant effect on the audit risk assessment process. The brainstorming session with high professional care can improve the risk identification capability. It is revealed that the high professional care, sharing information with equality, and encouraging new thoughts benefit the audit team to catch the risk changes and frauds in the financial statements.At last, the group decision making can make the auditors conservatism towards the audit risk, but only the brainstorming session can improve the identification capability of the auditors. In addition, SAS NO.99"requires ’brainstorming’sessions to discuss how and where the entity’s financial statements might be susceptible to material misstatement due to fraud", which can be a lesson for the sake of Chinese audit.In total, this dissertation targets the risk attitude from both the individual and the group auditors. First, the research background and the contributions are introduced. Second, the literature reviews are delivered, which explains the self efficacy, the group decision making and the audit risk assessment. Third, this dissertation makes a brief introduction on the related theories to this research, including the behavioral decision making theory and the behavioral auditing theory. Fourth, the subject of this dissertation, the relationship between the self efficacy, the group decision making and the audit risk assessment, is explained and confirmed by the experimental methodology. In addition, questionnaires are applied in this dissertation, which supports the result of this research. At last, some suggestions are put forward to improve the audit risk assessment procedure and the audit quality.The contribution made by this research can be revealed as follows.Firstly, the dissertation applies the interdisciplinary research to enrich the audit assessment. This research regards the audit risk assessment as a complex behavioral decision-making process from the perspective of the applied psychological theory and the behavioral decision making theory, which can improve the understanding of the audit risk assessment.Secondly, this research separates the risk attitude of the auditors, in order to find the mechanism in the audit assessment process. It is obvious that the auditors depend on their risk attitude to make decisions, in which two risk attitude dimensions affects the decision making in the assessment.Thirdly, two subjects, the individual auditor and the audit team, are involved in this research to make a comparison, which contributes to either the audit theory or the improvement of the principle in reality.At last, this research applies the experimental method to find the result. Compared to the traditional archival research and the questionnaire research, the experimental methodology makes a different by special strengths. Applying the experiments in the audit research, the contents of the behavioral auditing is expended and various. |
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