An Empirical Study On Self-serving Attribution Tendency In Chinese Listed Company’s Annual Report

High-quality accounting information is crucial to the stakeholders in making decisions. The scholars had made certain achievements of the empirical research about accounting data manipulation,deliberately misleading or cheating investors related of the managers of listed companies. But the research objects are mainly composed of data information. However, the accounting information manipulated is not limited to data information, the deliberate manipulation could also exist in language. In recent years, as a part of the accounting information,the disclosure of language is increasingly longer, which left a large space for the manager to play. During the past twenty years,Western scholars had done many research about the quality of information.They had confirmed that the accounting language information is one of the most important factor in packaging annual report of listed companies, and the managers deliberately misleading the information demanders by manipulating the content of the language information,which is referred to as the "self-interest attribution". This research will focus on the performance of self-interest attribution in Chinese listed company’s annual reports and take the problem of agency as the breakthrough point to deeply discuss the difference of attribution performance under different corporate model.First of all, this research reviews the related research of domestic and foreign scholars. The results mainly serve as the proof of the existence of attribution tendency in reports.The conclusion is consistent in home and abroad. But currently,there is a lack of the expansion research, such as the influence factors, motivation, etc.Secondly, this research carries on the performance of self-interesting attribution tendency and its influencing factors—corporate governance model. Specific description of the basic theories will also be given in this part, such as attribution theory, agency theory, control theory, information economics. And the effect mechanism of corporate governance model on the self-interesting attribution tendency will be analyzed in detail.Finally, based on the annual report of listed companies in 2012, the research about the existence of the self-interesting attribution tendency and its difference under different corporate governance models will be done in this part,and some significant conclusions will be drawn.