The Effects of Audit Task on Evidence Integration and Belief Revision.

Abstract This paper reports the results of a study investigating the effects of audit task on auditors' evidence integration processes and subsequent belief revision. Hogarth and Einhom 1992 recently proposed a belief-adjustment model which predicts that evaluation-type tasks will produce data which fit additive summation integration models, while estimation-type tasks are expected to produce data which fit nonadditive averaging integration models. Results of the experiment are consistent with these predictions. This study found that the degree of nonadditivity in auditors' judgment processes is affected, in a predictable manner, by characteristics of the audit task. One implication of the results is that nonadditive, configurai cue utilization by auditors may be more common than suggested by previous research. A second implication is that the effect of a given piece of audit evidence on auditors' judgments may depend on whether the audit task is an estimationtype or an evaluation-type task.