The Alumni Effect and Professional Skepticism: An Experimental Investigation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SYNOPSIS Regulators consider lack of professional skepticism to be a major cause of audit deficiencies and are concerned that auditors are more willing to accommodate less conservative accounting policies in clients employing a former partner of their firm because of diminished skepticism. This study examines the impact of audit firm alumni serving as senior members of client's management on auditors' skeptical judgment. In a controlled experiment with three different conditions, audit managers assessed the potential impairment of goodwill. The results indicate that auditors are more likely to make a judgment that agrees with the client's position when the CFO is a former engagement partner from their firm, and are more confident in the CFO's position when the CFO is a former Big 4 partner, whether from their own firm or another firm, than when the CFO is not identified as having any affiliation with any audit firm. Together, these results suggest that there is an alumni effect and that the effect is also partially influenced by the differing levels of auditor's confidence in the CFO's position, as a consequence of the CFO's known or unknown affiliation with Big 4 firms.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it