Measuring executive personality using machine‐learning algorithms: A new approach and audit fee‐based validation tests
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
Abstract We present a novel approach for measuring executive personality traits. Relying on recent developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we utilize the IBM Watson Personality Insights service to measure executive personalities based on CEOs’ and CFOs’ responses to questions raised by analysts during conference calls. We obtain the Big Five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism – based on which we estimate risk tolerance. To validate these traits, we first demonstrate that our risk‐tolerance measure varies with existing inherent and behavioural‐based measures (gender, age, sensitivity of executive compensation to stock return volatility, and executive unexercised‐vested options) in predictable ways. Second, we show that variation in firm‐year level personality trait measures, including risk tolerance, is largely explained by manager characteristics, as opposed to firm characteristics and firm performance. Finally, we find that executive inherent risk tolerance helps explain the positive relationship between client risk and audit fees documented in the prior literature. Specifically, the effect of CEO risk‐tolerance – as an innate personality trait – on audit fees is incremental to the effect of increased risk appetite from equity risk‐taking incentives (Vega). Measuring executive personality using machine‐learning algorithms will thus allow researchers to pursue studies that were previously difficult to conduct.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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