The Effects of Information Acquisition Effort, Psychological Ownership, and Reporting Context on Opportunistic Managerial Reporting*
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A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
The three-model screen
all 1,000 screened works →All three models called this out of scope.
Accounting experiment on opportunistic managerial reporting; 'reporting' is budget reporting by managers, not research reporting.
The experiment studies managerial reporting behavior, not research practice.
Accounting experiment on managerial budget reporting and honesty; reporting here is business reporting, not research reporting.
Abstract
ABSTRACT Within the context of managerial reporting, the tasks of acquiring and reporting information are logically connected. Although the accounting literature acknowledges their importance, it often treats these tasks as distinct processes. I investigate how the effort exerted to acquire information influences managers' reporting. Managers' information acquisition effort can induce psychological ownership that can lead to a sense of deservingness that increases opportunistic reporting or to a sense of responsibility that reduces opportunism. I predict that the reporting context determines the ultimate effect of information acquisition effort on reporting behavior. I test this prediction with a 2×2 budget reporting experiment. Managers are either endowed with information to report or required to exert effort to earn it, with the latter expected to generate more psychological ownership. In addition, I manipulate the saliency of honesty in the reporting context by framing reporting in terms of a business dilemma (less salient honesty) or an ethical dilemma (more salient honesty). I find that when honesty is less salient, managers build more slack into their report under earned information than endowed information. In contrast, more salient honesty alleviates the effect of earned information on slack. In a supplemental experiment, I find similar results when all managers are endowed with information to report but psychological ownership is manipulated via different firm messaging. These results have important implications for theory and practice. For example, in a less salient honesty context, technological investments that reduce managers' effort needed to acquire information can also help decrease opportunistic reporting.
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
The record
- Venue
- Contemporary Accounting Research
- Topic
- Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Field
- Social Sciences
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- HonestySalientContext (archaeology)DilemmaOpportunismBusinessInformation asymmetryCynicismPsychologyPublic relationsSocial psychologyEconomicsPolitical scienceFinance
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes