...Litigation Exposure in Identifying & Investigating Fraud Risk In the backlash of fraud and failed auditing, a more stringent standard for auditors was enacted in hopes to avoid the failures of the early 2000s. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and statements of auditing standards such as SAS 99 were put into place to accomplish this goal. Yet, with more stringent standards comes a heightened public expectation that may increase the potential litigation auditors face. In the world of auditing, a very important aspect that should always concern an auditing firm is the risk of litigation exposure that a firm may encounter in performing an audit. Here, we will look at the guidelines advocated by Statement on Auditing Standard No. 99 in the context of several scenarios to see how the procedures promoted by it may increase the risk of litigation exposure that a firm faces in the event that fraud goes undetected. Statement on Auditing Standard no. 99 requires, as part of planning the audit, that there be a discussion among the audit team members to consider how and where the entity's financial statements might be susceptible to material misstatement due to fraud and to reinforce the importance of adopting an appropriate mindset of professional skepticism. SAS 99 instructs auditors to identify general and specific fraud risks that might be present in a client’s company. While this initial identification of areas where potential fraud risks exist is of great importance for the auditor...
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...Causal reasoning in financial reporting and voluntary disclosure This paper examines causal reasoning, applying the theories to financial reporting. Causal reasoning involves diagnosis (determining the cause of an effect) and prediction (vice versa). These are important and commonplace amongst analysts, investors and management regarding company earnings and share prices. However, there is very little recent research employing causal reasoning theories to this field. Attribution theory describes how causes are attributed to past events. This may be dispositional (attributed to a person) or situational. In a single instance of an outcome, correspondent inference theory suggests diagnosis is based on choice, expectations and intent. Expected, freely chosen behaviour is considered to be dispositional, whereas unexpected, forced behaviour is attributed to situation. Attributing intent is simplest when considering behaviour with only one positive effect. When an outcome occurs numerous times, covariation theory describes possible cause attribution. This involves looking at cases where the suspected cause is present/absent and matching them to instances where the outcome is present/absent, utilising information on consensus (how others behave), distinctiveness (how the individual behaves in different circumstances) and consistency (how the individual has behaved in similar circumstances). Consistency should be high to make a good attribution judgement. When consensus and distinctiveness...
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... 09.03.2015 Semester B 2014/2015 Rianne Okkema, 40070660 Mind, Brain and Language Thinking through language (Bloom and Keil 2001) My little nephew of two years old has begun talking in Frisian, the native language of people from the northern part of The Netherlands. For many people from this part of the country, Frisian and Dutch are their mother tongue because Dutch is the official language of The Netherlands. A lot of children, like my nephew, begin learning and speaking Dutch only when they enter school. In a couple of years my nephew will start his school life; will the change of knowing not one, but two languages in this young age change his way of thinking? According to Paul Bloom and Frank Keil it might. In their paper Thinking through language (2001) they look at several views and discuss the relation between language and thought, in particular, whether language influences thought. Some say language does not affect your thoughts while others do say that the language you learn has a profound influence on how you think. Theories At first Paul Bloom and Frank Keil make a distinction between theories of the claim language-affects-thought. The first distinction is about three positions. One can believe in language-general effects, in language-general and language-specific effect and one can believe in that neither of these effects exists. The second distinction is about the aspect of language that are said to matter, especially between words and syntax...
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...Information Sara Fisher Ellison M.I.T. Christopher M. Snyder Dartmouth College June 2010 Abstract: We study competition among a score of firms participating in an online market for a commodity-type memory module. Firms were able to adjust prices continuously and prices determined how the firms were ranked and listed (lowest price listed first), with better ranks contributing to firms' sales. Using a year's worth of hourly data, we document the pricing dynamics, cycles, and other patterns in this market. We then characterize empirically the factors which drive price changes, noting clear evidence of firm heterogeneity in the choice of pricing strategy. Finally, we develop a framework for simulating counterfactual market settings, using the simulations to examine counterfactuals involving different mixes of firms according to pricing strategies. JEL Codes: L11, C73, D21, L81 Contact Information: Ellison: Department of Economics, M.I.T., 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142; tel. (617) 253-3821; fax. (617) 253-1330; email sellison@mit.edu. Snyder: Department of Economics, Dartmouth College, 301 Rockefeller Hall, Hanover, NH 03755; tel. (603) 646-0642, fax. (603) 646-2122, email chris.snyder@dartmouth.edu. Acknowledgments: The authors are grateful to Hongkai Zhang for superb research assistance and to Glenn Ellison for a number of useful conversations. 1. Introduction There is a vast and rich theoretical literature on the dynamics of repeated games. One conclusion...
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...On How to Build a Moral Machine Paul Bello PAUL . BELLO @ NAVY. MIL Human & Bioengineered Systems Division - Code 341, Office of Naval Research, 875 N. Randolph St., Arlington, VA 22203 USA Selmer Bringsjord SELMER @ RPI . EDU Depts. of Cognitive Science, Computer Science & the Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180 USA Abstract Herein we make a plea to machine ethicists for the inclusion of constraints on their theories consistent with empirical data on human moral cognition. As philosophers, we clearly lack widely accepted solutions to issues regarding the existence of free will, the nature of persons and firm conditions on moral agency/patienthood; all of which are indispensable concepts to be deployed by any machine able to make moral judgments. No agreement seems forthcoming on these matters, and we don’t hold out hope for machines that can both always do the right thing (on some general ethic) and produce explanations for its behavior that would be understandable to a human confederate. Our tentative solution involves understanding the folk concepts associated with our moral intuitions regarding these matters, and how they might be dependent upon the nature of human cognitive architecture. It is in this spirit that we begin to explore the complexities inherent in human moral judgment via computational theories of the human cognitive architecture, rather than under the extreme constraints imposed by rational-actor models assumed throughout...
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...Methodological Issues in Management Research Lee Sechrest, PhD Professor Department of Psychology University of Arizona Room 312 Tuscon, AZ 85721 White paper prepared for the Department of Veterans Affairs Management Research in VA Workshop, sponsored by the HSR&D Management Decision and Research Center November 19-20, 2001 Methodological Issues in Management Research Managers want to make good decisions. Any decisions will, by definition, be made on the basis of some presumed information. Even if a decision were to be made by throwing dice, that process would almost certain stem from “information” indicating that no better basis for the decision could be discerned, e.g., that a randomly determined choice would be likely to be better than a decision open to bias. At least to some extent, it is axiomatic that the better the information, the better the decisions. It is useful to distinguish between data, facts, and information. Data are simply observations, usually in the form of numbers thought to represent some systematic process underlying them, i.e., a process generating the numbers. Data do not mean anything or tell us anything until they are interpreted in some way. Merely to have an observation that on a particular day 43 patients were reported to have received a particular service is not in itself meaningful. Facts are merely data elevated in confidence to a point of suggested certainty. The observation that 43 patients received a service may be...
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...NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES IMPLICATIONS OF POPULATION AGING FOR ECONOMIC GROWTH David E. Bloom David Canning Günther Fink Working Paper 16705 http://www.nber.org/papers/w16705 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 January 2011 Support for this work was provided by the Program on the Global Demography of Aging at Harvard University, funded by Award Number P30AG024409 from the National Institute on Aging. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Aging or the National Institutes of Health. The authors thank Marija Ozolins and Larry Rosenberg for their assistance in the preparation of this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2011 by David E. Bloom, David Canning, and Günther Fink. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Implications of Population Aging for Economic Growth David E. Bloom, David Canning, and Günther Fink NBER Working Paper No. 16705 January 2011 JEL No....
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...Running Head: LITERATURE REVIEW: HALO EFFECT 1 Literature Review: HALO EFFECT NO NAME GIVEN HERE Liberty University BUSI 600-B04 21 January 2013 LITERATURE REVIEW: HALO EFFECT Abstract 2 The term “Halo Effect” has several definitions. In conducting business research, it is important to understand which definition is to be used and apply that definition to the problem at hand. In this paper, we will attempt to define the correct version of the halo effect as it applies to this literature review. This paper will then look at the history of the halo effect in business and define how it is being used today. During the writing, examples and studies regarding the halo effect that have already been completed will also be reviewed to see if the halo effect can genuinely and repeatedly be used in business to increase profits or generate revenues. LITERATURE REVIEW: HALO EFFECT Literature Review: Halo Effect Introduction Definition When discussing and researching the term “Halo Effect” the various definitions of the 3 phrase must be reviewed. Once reviewed, the researcher then has the responsibility to determine which definition best fits their research question at hand in order to best formulate the research design and subsequent answer. One of the definitions of halo effect is from the textbook Business research methods by Donald Cooper. It is defined as “error caused when prior observations influence perceptions of current observations” (Cooper & Schindler...
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...territorial integrity became one of the major concerns to be solved. At that time the majority of Georgian society thought that integrity issue would be solved in the peaceful manner. However, since then, events developed in such way that in August 2008 military conflict launched in South Ossetia. The nature of this conflict had significant implications for regional and international power politics. According to the American scientist Kenneth Waltz “peace is the one among a number of ends simultaneously entertained… To explain how peace can be more readily achieved requires an understanding of the causes of the war”. After the war between Russia and Georgia the whole world was concerned about what was the reason of the August war? This paper attempts to review some literature about this topic trying to answer this main question and create even a little understanding of the views that were expressed during or after the war. According the literature reviewed, views about causes of the war can be divided in two parts. First part is about interests’ contradiction between Russia and the USA and the second – about “Matter” of Saakashvili. Interests’ contradiction – Russia and the USA The views about Russia’s interest are express by Riho Ühtegi in his article “the 2008 Russia-Georgia war five years later”, that was published in Estonian analytical journal Diplomaatia. As the author explains situation in the Caucasus, “the area has been in Russia’s sphere of influence already...
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...nonexistent (“delusive”), as reducible, as emergent, or as a basic property of a substance (a “differentiating” attribute). The physical might be seen in one of the same four ways. So a fourby-four matrix of views results. (The seventeenth entry arises from Broad’s division of the substance/substance view according to whether one substance or two is involved.) At the end, three views are left standing: those on which mentality is an emergent characteristic of either a physical substance or a neutral substance, where in the latter case, the physical might be either emergent or delusive. 1 Published in S. Stich & T. Warfield, eds, Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind (Blackwell, 2003). This paper is an overview of issues concerning the metaphysics of consciousness. Much of the discussion in this paper (especially the first part) recapitulates discussion in Chalmers (1995; 1996; 1997), although it...
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...Public Disclosure Authorized WPS5314 Policy Research Working Paper 5314 Public Disclosure Authorized Regional Trade Agreements Caroline Freund Emanuel Ornelas Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized The World Bank Development Research Group Trade and Integration Team May 2010 Policy Research Working Paper 5314 Abstract This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on regionalism. The formation of regional trade agreements has been, by far, the most popular form of reciprocal trade liberalization in the past 15 years. The discriminatory character of these agreements has raised three main concerns: that trade diversion would be rampant, because special interest groups would induce governments to form the most distortionary agreements; that broader external trade liberalization would stall or reverse; and that multilateralism could be undermined. Theoretically, all of these concerns are legitimate, although there are also several theoretical arguments that oppose them. Empirically, neither widespread trade diversion nor stalled external liberalization has materialized, while the undermining of multilateralism has not been properly tested. There are also several aspects of regionalism that have received too little attention from researchers, but which are central to understanding its causes and consequences. This paper—a product of the Trade and Integration Team, Development Research Group—is part of a larger effort in...
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...COVER PAGE Table of contents Introduction 3 Chapter 1 Modal and Semi-Modal Verbs: Theoretical Aspect 4 1.1. Modal and Semi-Modal Verbs and Their Different Interpretations 4 1.2. Syntax, Morphology and Scope of semi-modal verbs 7 Chapter 2: Semi-Modal Verb GET: Practical Aspect 12 2.1. Usage: Tense and Aspect 12 2.2. Different Uses of Semi-Modal Verb GET 14 Conclusions 19 Bibliography 20 Introduction Human language is truly unique as it allows us to talk about things beyond here and now. The way we do so is through the Tense, Aspect and Modality systems of natural language. Modality is what this paper is about. Roughly speaking, modality allows us to talk about events that may not have happened, but are desired or required. Modality is completely autonomous unit, and it affects our language usage in many ways. Tense and Modality are undeniably interconnected: what used to be a possibility a month ago may not be one today. Tense and Aspect are likewise related: a punctual event that took place yesterday may not hold at present, but an event (or state) that is more durative may still hold. The primary function of modal verbs is to enable us to talk about possibilities and necessities. We can talk about the ways the world should be, were there peace on Earth, how it might have been, would Christopher Columbus not have landed in America, etc... This ability to go beyond...
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...Data Hight, Marc A., 1969– Idea and ontology : an essay in early modern metaphysics of ideas / Marc A. Hight. p. cm. Summary: ‘‘Provides an interpretation of the development of the ontology of ideas from Descartes to Hume that reaffirms the vital role metaphysical concerns played in early modern thinking’’—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0-271–03383–9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Ontology. 2. Idea (Philosophy). 3. Metaphysics. I. Title. BD301.H54 2008 110.9—dc22 2008002466 2008 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 Copyright The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. This book is printed on Natures Natural, containing 50% post-consumer waste, and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. For ict and snj and `e in memory of rene elizabeth hight (1968–2006) contents Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction: Idea Ontology and the Early Modern Tale 1 1 the traditional ontology 11 1.1 Substance 12 1.2 Modes 20 1.3 What Is an Idea? 22 1.4 Stretching Idea Ontologies 34 2 descartes 37 2.1 Representation 38 2.2 Perception...
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...Hawking contra Philosophy Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence. Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of interviewers and journalists – that philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics. In earlier times – Hawking conceded – philosophers not only tried to keep up but sometimes made significant scientific contributions of their own. However they were now, in so far as they had any influence at all, just an obstacle to progress through their endless going-on about the same old issues of truth, knowledge, the problem of induction, and so forth. Had philosophers just paid a bit more attention to the scientific literature they would have gathered that these were no longer live issues for anyone remotely au fait with the latest thinking. Then their options would be either to shut up shop and cease the charade called ‘philosophy of science’ or else to carry on and invite further ridicule for their head-in-the-sand attitude. Predictably enough the journalists went off to find themselves media-friendly philosophers – not hard to do nowadays – who would argue the contrary case in a suitably vigorous way. On the whole the responses, or those that I came across, seemed overly anxious to strike...
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...BARACK OBAMA'S SOUTH CAROLINA SPEECH Introduction In this paper, I shall analyze US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama's South Carolina victory speech from a particular pragmatic perspective. In particular, I shall explore the idea that this speech is constituted by many voices (in other words, it displays polyphony, to use an idea due to Bakhtin 1981, 1986) and that the audience is part of this speech event, adding and contributing to its text in a collaborative way (in particular, in constructing meaning). As many are aware (including the journalists who report day by day on Barack Obama's achievements), Obama uses the technique of 'personification' (The Economist, Dec 13th, 2007). When he voices an idea, he does not just expose it as if it came from himself, but gets another person (fictitious or, plausibly, real) to voice it. Since in an electoral speech, he cannot reasonably get people on stage to voice his ideas, he personifies ideas by narrating what people told him. His stories are his way of personifying his ideas. The discourse strategy he uses serves to reverse the direction of influence from the people in control to the people controlled (see van Dijk 2003). Duranti (2006b) writes that The language of politics has been presented and studied in terms of its ability to persuade an audience (of peers, subjects, and superiors) to go along with the speaker's view of the world and his or her proposal (Perrot 2000). In much of this literature, the successful political...
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