.... ¹ motivated reasoning information search professional skepticism fair value decision making Fair values and other complex estimates (FVEs) are common in financial reporting, and research suggests that although management's FVEs may be biased, auditors may not exercise sufficient...

... the theory of motivated reasoning ( Kunda 1990 , 1999 ) to examine the malleability of individual auditors' judgments after auditors have reached their own independent conclusions. In a between-subjects experiment with practicing auditors and audit students, we find that auditors who learn...