Auditor task prioritization: the effects of time pressure and psychological ownership

We study how auditors prioritize their tasks and how differential task prioritization affects auditors’ judgment performance. We leverage Conservation of Resources theory to build our predictions and test these predictions using three experiments with over 350 professional auditors.

The first two experiments focus on investigating whether task prioritization affects auditors’ judgment performance. Across two settings, we manipulate task order and find that prioritizing an easy task leads to lower judgment performance than prioritizing a difficult task. In our third experiment, we give auditors discretion over task ordering and find that they tend to prioritize easy tasks over difficult tasks. Easy task prioritization is further exacerbated under higher time pressure and is least prevalent in conditions where time pressure is lower and psychological ownership is enhanced.