Research On Accounting Professional Judgment Based On Representative Heuristics

Many scholars have described the impact of account subjects,accounting matters,accounting rules on accounting judgement,but little of them prove that.After Simon proved that 'human beings is bound rational',authors gradually pay close attention to influence of mental process of accountants on professional judgment.Due to the judgement results source from accounting subjects by information transmission,the consensus reached is that the main characteristics of accountants play a more essential role in accounting professional judglent.According to Tversky and Kahneman(1974),representational heuristic cognitive bias refers to the tendency of accountants to neglect infornation characteristics due to their own experience in professional judgment,including the base rate before incremental information,the reliability or predictability of information and the sample size involved in information.Tversky and Kahneman examined that the bias exists in the judgement of students,graduates even statistician.Thus,in the process of professional judgment,will accountants produce the representative bias that ignores the base rate and information reliability as above?If it comes into being,what are the conditions for it to come into being?If not,what is the reason for its emphasis?How to avoid it?In order to answer the above questions,this paper takes the re-estimation of bad debts receivable and the subsequent measurement changes of investment real estate as examples,and adopts the between-subjects behavioral experimental research method to design the base rate and information reliability.It is find that the accountants value base rate generally,however,they degree of it decreases by the increase of information content.For information reliability,when the content of information is low,accountants pay less attention to it because they think the information is useless.When the content of information is high,they value it due to its usefulness.However,due to the different prudence of accountants in different judgment cases,the role of trust in management is different in separate cases.Therefore,even if the information content is high,information reliability is still ignored in the experiment of subsequent measurement method changes of investment real estate.Finally,the self-confidence of accountants has a certain adjustment effect on the base rate and information reliability:compared with the accountants of the low self-confidence group,the accountants of the high self-confidence group will increase the differences of base rate and information of reliability when judging,so that it effectively avoids representative bias.The dissertation has seven parts:The first part mainly elaborates the research background,research significance,research methods and innovations of this paper.The second part mainly reviews the relevant literature on accounting professional judgment and heuristic bias,highlighting the significance and contribution of this study.The third part is mainly about the theoretical basis and hypothesis,including Bayesian theory,bounded rationality,cognitive information processing theory and competency theory,and based on them to put forward the hypothesis.The fourth part is mainly about the research and design.It mainly includes the content of the experiment design and the description of the data variables.The fifth part is the analysis of experimental results,including manipulation test,descriptive statistics and variance analysis,and adjustment effect test.The sixth part is further analysis,including the further analysis for information reliability under high information content.In addition,the robustness test is took on the research conclusion of the base rate in this paper.The seventh part is mainly about the research conclusions,research deficiencies and future prospects,including the conclusions for the representative heuristic bias,some of the deficiencies of the research have been the direction of future research.This study enriches the literature related to behavioral accounting,and provides a reference for the follow-up scholars to further study the judgment of accountants from the perspective of cognitive bias.From the practical point of view,the conclusions of this study are helpful for accountants to continue to maintain a proper combination of the base rates of the same industry,use professional skills to avoid ignoring the sources of information reliability.In addition,this study provides a reference for business managers to increase the training of cognitive psychology related courses for enterprise accountants.Finally,this study is helpful for standard makers to take psychological factors such as cognitive bias into account when formulating accounting standards to further refine and quantify accounting standards,and to provide better guidance for the professional judgment process of enterprise accountants.