Cumulative prospect theory and managerial incentives for fraudulent financial reporting

• Autores: Michael K. Fung
• Localización: Contemporary Accounting Research, ISSN-e 1911-3846, Vol. 32, Nº. 1, 2015, págs. 55-75
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Using samples of restating and nonrestating U.S. firms, the study empirically investigates the relationship between the incidence of fraudulent financial reporting and accounting-based performance outcomes. The outcomes are framed as gains and losses relative to a reference point, defined as the mean performance of industry peers. Consistent with cumulative prospect theory (CPT), the findings show that fraud incidence is positively (negatively) related to the probability of a loss (gain); more (less) sensitive to the probability of a loss (gain) (i.e., loss-aversion); and more (less) sensitive to an extra unit of the probability at a high- or low- (medium-) probability level (i.e., nonlinear probability weighting function). The study extends the fraudulent financial reporting literature by formulating fraud incidence as a function of performance outcomes using peer performance as a reference point. By testing CPT's individual-level behavioral implications on firm-level archival data, the study reconceptualizes the investigation of fraudulent financial reporting in terms of risk attitude and extends prior investigations of CPT from laboratory experiments to a real-world setting of fraudulent financial reporting.