To assess fraud risk, auditors collect evidence in a sequential manner by reviewing workpaper documentation, and by collecting corroborating and clarifying information from financial (management) personnel and nonfinancial (operating) personnel. SAS 99 (AICPA, 2002) noted that audit evidence gathered from financial personnel may be susceptible to deception. In addition, prior researchers have found auditors to be poor at detecting deception immediately following deceptive communication. Though the audit process is sequential and iterative, these studies measured auditors– ability to detect deception at a single point and did not provide corroborating evidence after the deceptive communication for auditors to revise their judgments. In this study, I examined auditors’ fraud risk assessments and truthfulness judgments throughout the audit process when there was an attempt at deception by management (financial) personnel. The belief adjustment model provided a framework to examine auditors’ initial judgments, their judgments directly following a deception attempt by financial personnel, and their judgments after receiving corroborating evidence from nonfinancial personnel. Sixty-four experienced auditors electronically completed one of four randomly assigned cases and, within each case, assessed the fraud risk, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and reliability of financial personnel at multiple points for a fictitious client. I manipulated the presence (absence) of fraud and the level of experience of the source of corroborating evidence (operating personnel). I hypothesized that auditors would not be able to differentially evaluate fraud risk and truthfulness judgments of financial personnel between the fraud and no fraud conditions when exposed to workpaper documentation and deceptive client inquiry evidence by management (financial personnel). However, I expected to find that auditors– would update their fraud risk and truthfulness judgments as they reviewed audit evidence from nonfinancial (operating) personnel. The results indicate that auditors in this study are not able to appropriately assess fraud risk and the truthfulness of financial personnel following the review of workpaper and client inquiry evidence. While the client was deceptive in the fraud condition only, auditors did not differentially assess the fraud risk and truthfulness of financial personnel between the fraud and no fraud conditions. After auditors reviewed evidence from nonfinancial personnel, in the presence of fraud, auditors increased their fraud risk and decreased their truthfulness judgments of financial personnel as inconsistent evidence was presented from a corroborating source. Therefore, in the presence of fraud, auditors improved the effectiveness of the audit process by appropriately increasing their fraud risk assessments in light of inconsistent audit evidence from nonfinancial (operating) personnel. Of equal importance, in the absence of fraud, auditors decreased their fraud risk assessments as consistent evidence was presented from a corroborating source. Therefore, auditors increased the efficiency of the audit process by appropriately decreasing their fraud risk assessments after integrating consistent audit evidence from nonfinancial personnel into their judgments. Further, I observed that these auditors revised their fraud risk assessments to a greater extent when audit evidence was provided by a source with a higher level of experience. Though prior research has found auditors to be poor at detecting deception, the results of this study indicate that auditors will increase or decrease their fraud risk assessments and truthfulness judgments based on the consistency of audit evidence gathered from a corroborating source. Therefore, in practice, auditors may be able to detect deception as the audit progresses. / Ph. D.

In the area of transportation policy, congestion pricing has been used to alleviate traffic congestion in metropolitan areas. The focus of Chapter 1 is to examine drivers’ perceived risk of traffic delay as one determinant of reactions to congestion pricing. The experiment reported in this essay recruits commuters from the Atlanta and Orlando metropolitan areas to participate in a naturalistic experiment where they are asked to make repeated route decisions in a driving simulator. Chapter 1 examines belief formation and adjustments under an endogenous information environment where information about a route can be obtained only conditional on taking the route. If the subjects arrive to the destination late, i.e. beyond an assigned time threshold, they are faced with a discrete (flat) penalty. In contrast, Chapter 2 examines subjective beliefs in a setting where the penalty for a late arrival is continuous, such that a longer delay incurs additional penalty on the driver. The primary research question is: does belief formation differ when the late penalty is induced as a continuous amount compared to when it is induced as a discrete amount? In particular, will we observe a difference in learning across the range of congestion probabilities under different penalty settings? In the continuous penalty setting, we do not observe a difference in learning across the range of congestion probabilities. In contrast, in the discrete penalty setting we observe significant belief adjustments in the lowest congestion risk scenario. In Chapter 3 the “source method” is used to examine how uncertainty aversion differs across events that have the same underlying objective probabilities but are presented under varying degrees of uncertainty. Subjects are presented with three lottery tasks that rank in order of increasing uncertainty. Given the choices observed in each task a source function is estimated jointly with risk attitudes under different probability weighting specifications of the source function. Results from the Prelec probability weighting suggest that, as the degree of uncertainty increases, subjects display increased pessimism; in contrast, the Tversky-Kahneman (1992) and the Power probability weightings detect no such difference. Thus, the conclusion regarding uncertainty aversion are contingent on which probability weighting specification is assumed for the source function.