A Research Note on the Influence of Outcome Knowledge on Audit Partners' Judgments

Audit partners may be called upon to evaluate, ex post, the work of another auditor. One example of such an evaluation is a Peer Review. An experiment was conducted that examined the influence of outcome knowledge on the going concern and peer evaluation judgments of 122 audit partners from Canada and the United States. Outcome information was manipulated at three levels—no outcome, negative outcome, and positive outcome information. The results confirm previous research and show that audit partners are subject to the influence of outcome information. Negative outcome information influenced (1) audit partners' assessments of the likelihood of the client's continued existence (hindsight effects), (2) the evaluation of the incumbent auditor's judgment (outcome effects), and (3) judgments of the importance of evidence items. Auditors who received outcome information tended to rate outcome‐consistent items of evidence as more important. This suggests that the biasing effect of outcome knowledge operates by acting as a filter that magnifies the relative salience of outcome‐consistent information.