The Quest for Rationality: Chief Financial Officers’ and Accounting Master’s Students’ Perception of Economic Rationality

Abstract

This article, based on experimental evidence, reports insights into how chief financial officers—experts—and master’s students in accounting—novices—perceive economic rationality within the field of accounting. Based on the prospect theory and the fourfold pattern, four scenarios, covering everyday business situations, are used as a measurement instrument for capturing the experimental subjects’ perception of economic rationality. The findings of the article indicate that the experts and the novices seem to be more economically rational when it comes to dealing with risk and uncertainty related to gains than when dealing with risk and uncertainty associated with losses. Furthermore, the novices tend to deal with the sunk-cost fallacy in a more economically rational way than the experts. From an economically rational point of view, mental accounting should not be particularly important in accounting judgment and decision making, but sometimes the experimental subjects seem to frame the scenario/issue at hand in mental-accounting terms.