The Use of Foresight Decision Aids in Auditors' Judgments.

A major cause of the expectation gap may be attributable to the different time frames in which auditors and judges/jurors view auditor performance. In our legal system, hindsight judgments are used to evaluate auditor decisions performed in foresight. The effect of outcome knowledge is to create a gap between hindsight and foresight perspectives. The purpose of this research is to evaluate whether it is possible to alter auditors' foresight expectations to approximate a hindsight perspective. Specifically, we propose that foresight strategies embedded into two separate decision aids could mitigate hindsight effects. An experiment was conducted with 131 audit seniors from one of the Big 5 public accounting firms. Our results indicate that one of the decision aids was effective in mitigating hindsight effects. These results suggest that auditors' ex ante decision process can be altered so their judgments approximate those of ex post evaluators. This has implications for audit legal liability as it suggests that rather than focusing exclusively on influencing judges' and jurors' expectations in hindsight, it may be expedient to also modify auditor expectations in foresight.