审计质量和经济结构

There has been considerable concern lately about the quality of audited financial statements.Auditing is private-sector acctivity subject to market influences.The market is promoted as being self-regulating,at lest in the united states.Auditing failure,therefor,can be viewed as a market failure.This paper looks at the economic structure of the auditing profession and the related consulting activities and nots the financial incentive and potential for market.The first section builds on a previously model of the auditing profession ad a social dilemma using game theory.This paper extends the model using theory of collective action by specifying the mechanisms for commitment and mutual monitoring and resolving second-order dilemmad.This section concludes that auditing is not a self -regulating activity.The second section proposes a modes of the interaction between auditing and consulting activities using entrepreneurial networks(Burt,1996).The third section looks at the interaction effects.The final section includes some possible actions for improving the probability of high quality audits.