Online labor markets allow rapid recruitment of large numbers of workers for very low pay. Although online workers are often used as research participants, there is little evidence that they are motivated to make costly choices to forgo wealth or leisure that are often central to addressing accounting research questions. Thus, we investigate the validity of using online workers as a proxy for non-experts when accounting research designs use more demanding tasks than these workers typically complete. Three experiments examine the costly choices of online workers relative to student research participants. We find that online workers are at least as willing as students to make costly choices, even at significantly lower wages. We also find that online workers are sensitive to performance-based wages, which are just as effective in inducing high effort as high fixed wages. We discuss implications of our results for conducting accounting research with online workers. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

Auditors frequently seek informal advice from peers to improve judgment quality, but the conditions under which advice improves auditor judgment are poorly understood. We predict and find evidence of a trust heuristic among auditors receiving advice from advisors with whom they share a social bond. This heuristic is evident among non-specialists, who weight advice according to its justifiability when it is received from a weaker social bond advisor, but fail to objectively assess the quality of advice received and weight it heavily when it comes from a stronger social bond advisor, regardless of its justifiability. Specialists, while less prone to the trust heuristic in advice weighting, show inconsistencies in advice weighting and their assessments of advice quality. In particular, specialists discount better justified advice from stronger social bond advisors, despite rating this advice as being of relatively high quality. This defensiveness likely arises from an aversive social comparison process attributable to the high ego-relevance of a task within one's specialization. Future research is warranted to corroborate or refute this possibility.

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It is an open question whether auditors have credible incentives to exercise professional skepticism. We focus on costly skepticism: skepticism that is appropriate and generates incremental costs, but does not identify a misstatement. Costly skepticism is typically not rewarded by audit supervisors. We theorize and find that rewarding costly skepticism may backfire and decrease skepticism on subsequent audit tasks where evidential red flags are present. We reason that auditors interpret the reward as a non-credible, better-than-expected outcome, leading auditors to view subsequent tasks from a risk-averse gain frame. As a result, auditors self-interestedly seek to avoid the risks and effort of exercising additional skepticism. This effect decreases auditors' sensitivity to red flags and auditors' willingness to inform their manager about severe red flags, compromising audit quality. Encouragingly, auditors who have experienced a history of rewards for costly skepticism are more motivated to exercise skepticism. A survey finds that audit supervisors are likely to reward costly skepticism when their own supervisors encourage the behavior and promote consultation within the engagement team. Overall, our results suggest firms may benefit from a culture shift emphasizing credible rewards for costly skepticism, but that firms currently may not "get what they reward."

We examine how managers assess performance and promotion prospects—that is, the ex ante likelihood of promotion—and the conditions under which these assessments diverge. We argue that managers apply different cognitive schemas when they make different assessments. To the extent that a signal provides different information about future versus current contributions, assessed performance and promotion prospects are likely to diverge. In two experiments, we manipulate professionals' promotion eligibility and level of consultative decision making. We find that experienced managers assess performance and promotion prospects differently, but only when professionals are promotion eligible. Specifically, more (as opposed to less) consultative decision making decreases promotion prospects while not affecting assessed performance (Experiment 1) or even improving it (Experiment 2). By contrast, more consultative decision making improves both assessments when professionals are not eligible for promotion. We shed light on the relations between subjective assessments, including that promotion is not necessarily the consequence of superior assessed performance.