Auditors' Covariation Judgments.

Abstract ABSTRACT: When making audit judgments end decisions, an auditor often relies on knowledge or information about how task variables covary. Typically, an auditor generates this information without the aid of a formal covariation model. Thus, the quality of audit judgments and decisions which rely on covariation information may depend on an auditor's ability to judge covariation in a manner that is paramorphic to 8 formal model. This paper reports two experiments examining the rules by which auditors Integrate joint frequency data when making covariation judgments end whether their judgments are affected by context, prior expectations, and amount of auditing experience. A main result was that the subjects generally used date-integration rules that were sensitive to the objective covariation level, but often overstated or understated this level. The effects of context, prior expectations, end amount of auditing experience were generally small.