IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/siu/wpaper/15-2005.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Auditor and the Firm: A Simple Model of Corporate Cheating and Intermediation

Author

Listed:
  • Brishti Guha

    (School of Economics and Social Sciences, Singapore Management University)

Abstract

We apply a game-theoretic model to the analysis of the recent spate of corporate scandals in which firms have cheated their investors, often with the aid of external auditors. We characterize the different types of equilibria that obtain for different parameter ranges in an auditor’s absence (the parameters we consider being “early signal accuracy” – a measure of transparency – and “withdrawal costs” – a measure of the liquidity of investments). We also analyze whether and under what conditions the presence of an informed auditor could lead to an improvement in the sense of honest behavior replacing cheating as the firms’ equilibrium strategy. In doing so we take into account the auditor’s incentives to collude with his clients or extort from them. We use our results to derive some policy predictions including those relating to the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, and contrast the case of a firm-hired intermediary (like an auditor) with the situation in which an intermediary is hired by investor consortia. Interestingly, we find that mandatory disclosure of audit fees could guarantee honest behavior, in equilibrium, for much of the parameter space in which cheating would have prevailed in an auditor’s absence – as investors are able to check that audit fees lie in a range which removes incentives to cheat for the auditor and his clients. Such disclosure would need to be backed by heavy penalties for false disclosure. We also find that while firm-hired intermediaries have a non-monotone reaction to improvements in public transparency, initially favoring and then opposing them, investor-hired intermediaries unambiguously dislike improvements in public transparency. We argue that frequent rotation of an auditor’s clients may have costs, not just benefits.

Suggested Citation

  • Brishti Guha, 2005. "The Auditor and the Firm: A Simple Model of Corporate Cheating and Intermediation," Working Papers 15-2005, Singapore Management University, School of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:siu:wpaper:15-2005
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mercury.smu.edu.sg/rsrchpubupload/5664/firmauditor.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Campbell, Tim S & Kracaw, William A, 1980. "Information Production, Market Signalling, and the Theory of Financial Intermediation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 35(4), pages 863-882, September.
    2. Diamond, Douglas W, 1991. "Monitoring and Reputation: The Choice between Bank Loans and Directly Placed Debt," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 99(4), pages 689-721, August.
    3. Avinash Dixit, 2003. "On Modes of Economic Governance," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 71(2), pages 449-481, March.
    4. Douglas W. Diamond & Raghuram G. Rajan, 2001. "Liquidity Risk, Liquidity Creation, and Financial Fragility: A Theory of Banking," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 109(2), pages 287-327, April.
    5. Garey Ramey & Joel Watson, 2002. "Contractual Intermediaries," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 18(2), pages 362-384, October.
    6. Craswell, Allen & Stokes, Donald J. & Laughton, Janet, 2002. "Auditor independence and fee dependence," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 253-275, June.
    7. Greif, Avner, 1993. "Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: the Maghribi Traders' Coalition," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 83(3), pages 525-548, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Brishti Guha, 2006. "Strategy Meets Evolution: Games Suppliers and Producers Play," Working Papers 06-2006, Singapore Management University, School of Economics.
    2. Tripathy, Niranjan & Wu, Da & Zheng, Yi, 2021. "Dividends and financial health: Evidence from U.S. bank holding companies," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    3. Christine Lagoutte, 2004. "Le paradoxe des banques britanniques," Revue d'Économie Financière, Programme National Persée, vol. 77(4), pages 329-353.
    4. Alessandria, George & Qian, Jun, 2005. "Endogenous financial intermediation and real effects of capital account liberalization," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 97-128, September.
    5. Cai, Jun & Cheung, Yan-Leung & Goyal, Vidhan K., 1999. "Bank monitoring and the maturity structure of Japanese corporate debt issues," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 7(3-4), pages 229-249, August.
    6. Brishti Guha, 2005. "Honesty and Intermediation: Corporate Cheating, Auditor Involvement and the Implications for Development," Working Papers 18-2005, Singapore Management University, School of Economics.
    7. Dhillon, Amrita & Rigolini, Jamele, 2011. "Development and the interaction of enforcement institutions," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(1), pages 79-87.
    8. Garavito, Fabian, 2009. "Organizational diseconomies in the mutual fund industry," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 29302, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    9. Mark Egan & Stefan Lewellen & Adi Sunderam, 2017. "The Cross Section of Bank Value," NBER Working Papers 23291, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Joyee Deb, 2008. "Cooperation and Community Responsibility: A Folk Theorem for Repeated Matching Games with Names," Working Papers 08-24, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.
    11. Ramey, Garey & Watson, Joel, 2000. "Conditioning Institutions and Renegotiation," University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series qt5zd216tw, Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
    12. Gorton, Gary & Winton, Andrew, 2003. "Financial intermediation," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 8, pages 431-552, Elsevier.
    13. Ruys, P.H.M., 2005. "The Governance of Services," Discussion Paper 2005-024, Tilburg University, Tilburg Law and Economic Center.
    14. O. Emre Ergungor & Leonardo Madureira & Nandkumar Nayar & Ajai K. Singh, 2011. "Banking relationships and sell-side research," Working Papers (Old Series) 1114, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    15. Guangming Gong & Liang Xiao & Si Xu & Xun Gong, 2019. "Do Bond Investors Care About Engagement Auditors’ Negative Experiences? Evidence from China," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 158(3), pages 779-806, September.
    16. Alessandro Giovannini & Maurizio Iacopetta & Raoul Minetti, 2013. "Financial Markets, Banks, and Growth : Disentangling the links," Revue de l'OFCE, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 0(5), pages 105-147.
    17. Enzo Dia, 2004. "Imperfect Information and Monopolistic Pricing in the Banking Industry," Working Papers 74, University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics, revised May 2004.
    18. Ahmed Baig & Benjamin M. Blau & Todd G. Griffith, 2021. "Firm Opacity and the Clustering of Stock Prices: the Case of Financial Intermediaries," Journal of Financial Services Research, Springer;Western Finance Association, vol. 60(2), pages 187-206, December.
    19. Uday Chandra & Nandkumar (Nandu) Nayar, 2008. "The Information Content of Private Debt Placements," Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(9‐10), pages 1164-1195, November.
    20. Adrian Van Rixtel & Luna Romo González & Jing Yang, 2015. "The determinants of long-term debt issuance by European banks: evidence of two crises," BIS Working Papers 513, Bank for International Settlements.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Corporate governance; auditing; disclosure; repeated games;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • L20 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:siu:wpaper:15-2005. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: QL THor (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sesmusg.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.