Can Auditors Trick Social Mechanisms? Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Trust on Auditors’ Objectivity

Trust between auditors and their clients is argued to threaten auditors’ objectivity and thus to compromise audit quality. This study investigates through an experiment, the impact of auditors’ competence-bysed trust and goodwill-based trust in their clients (Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman, 1995) on auditors’ objectivity (Bamber and Iyer, 2009).