【導讀】investintheasset.

　　

【正文】 cts were told that they could refer back to the requirements at any point in the experiment. In the next section of the experimental materials, the subjects were given a summary of the project at the end of the first year of operations. The summary included mixed evidence concerning the potential impairment of the entertainment plex assets at that point in time. The subjects were instructed to consider the evidence and to estimate the probability that the assets were impaired at the end of Year 1. This procedure was then repeated for Years 2 through 5. Before each decision, the subjects were reminded that they could refer to the requirements of SFAS No. 144 when making their decisions. The experiment was a mixed design that included two betweensubjects factors (involvement and accountability) and one withinsubjects factor (time). The involvement variable consisted of two levels: no involvement in the prior investment decision and involvement in the investment decision. The involvement manipulation was modeled after the involvement manipulation in Brown and Solomon (1987) as well as the personal responsibility manipulations in Jeffrey (1992) and in escalation of mitment studies (., Brody amp。 Kaplan, 1996). These manipulations generally require subjects in the involvement or personal responsibility condition to make an initial decision as well as a second decision which all subjects make. The manipulation in this study required subjects in the involvement condition to prepare a remendation to the capital budgeting mittee immediately after reading the case materials describing the proposed investment in the plex. Subjects in the no involvement condition were not asked to advise the mittee on the investment decision. The involvement manipulation in this study was intended to force subjects to make a mitment to the project prior to considering any information about asset impairment. The accountability variable consists of two levels: accountability and no accountability for their decisions. The variable was operationalized by having subjects in the accountability condition justify their probability estimates. This type of manipulation is mon in the accountability literature as noted by Arnold (1997). Subjects were randomly assigned to one of four experimental groups: (1) a control group which did not make an investment remendation nor provide justifications for the probability assessments, (2) an involvement group which make an investment remendation prior to assessing the probability that the asset was impaired but did not justify their probability assessments, (3) an accountability group which justified (in writing) their probability assessments but did not make an investment remendation, and(4) an involvement/accountability group which made an investment remendation and justified (in writing) their probability assessments. The dependent variable in the study is the estimated probability of asset impairment. The dependent variable is measured five times (., once for each year of data)。 thus, the experimental design includes a withinsubjects factor (., time). The dependent variable is intended to capture the subjects39。 overall assessments of the potential asset impairment based on the mixed evidence provided. This variable is consistent with idea in SFAS No. 144 that assets need only be tested for impairment if there is sufficient reason to believe that an asset impairment is possible. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS The results provide some evidence of the applicability of the Catastrophe Theory of Attitudes (CTA) in the accounting domain. The parison of the probability estimates of the involvement group subjects with those of the control group subjects (see Figure 4) reveals some characteristics predicted by the CTA. In the CTA model, the attitudes of the subjects who are not involved in an issue will change in a linear fashion with changes in the positivity of information (., the magnitude of the normal factor). As individuals bee more involved, the pattern changes and bees discontinuous, perhaps even catastrophic. In Figure 4, the means for both groups of subjects appear to be changing in relation to the degree of positivity of asset impairment evidence. However, the involved subjects were slower than the control group subjects to incorporate the negative news into their probability assessments. This is consistent with CTA’s hystersis prediction. While the behavior exhibited by the involved subjects did not reflect a truly catastrophic change (as the CTA would predict for highly involved subjects), it does give some indication that involved subjects were reacting differently to the asset impairment evidence than the control group subjects. One reason why the differences are not dramatic may be that the involvement manipulation was not strong enough. In the context of the CTA model, the involvement manipulation may have only moved subjects a little to the front of the model on the involvement dimension (., the splitting factor) and, thus, created only small differences in the way subjects responded. Small differences in responses would be consistent with the CTA model because the discontinuous change in the attitude only develops as the level of involvement bees high. The finding that accountability mitigates involvement is consistent with prior studies showing that accountability reduces judgment biases. In every year except Year 4, involved subjects who had to justify their probability assessments estimated higher probabilities that the entertainment plex assets were impaired than the involved subjects who did not justify their assessments. Thus, accountability appears to attenuate the effects of the prior involvement in the asset investment decision. This finding is important because the CTA predicts a primacy effect. Acco