Are Independent Audit Committee Members Objective? Experimental Evidence

We use experimental markets to examine stock-based compensation's impact on the objectivity of participants serving as audit committee members. We compare audit committee member reporting objectivity under three regimes: no stockbased compensation, stock-based compensation linked to current shareholders, and stock-based compensation linked to future shareholders. Our experiments show that student participants serving as audit committee members prefer biased reporting when compensated with stock-based compensation. Audit committee members compensated with current stock-based compensation prefer aggressive reporting, and audit committee members compensated with future stock-based compensation prefer overly conservative reporting. We find that audit committee members who do not receive stock-based compensation are the most objective. Our study suggests that stockbased compensation impacts audit committee member preferences for biased reporting, suggesting the need for additional research in this area.