Date of Award

1988

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Accounting

First Advisor

Bart P. Hartman

Abstract

This study identified the financial information used by the loan officers in a commercial lending context. The identification of information acquisition made it possible for the researcher to verify whether the manipulated financial information in the experiment was processed by the subjects. As a consequence, the inference concerning the impact of the treatment on loan officers' decisions could be more conclusive. Most real decision tasks are similar to a situation in which the decision maker has to search for and decide which information to use rather than conforming to an a priori decision model specified by the researcher. The subjects in most lens model studies are, however, requested to perform tasks based on the cue sets predetermined by the researchers. Therefore, this study was also designed to investigate the impact of cue-selection discretion on loan officers' decision-making. The impact of lessee accounting per SFAS 13 was used to operationalize this research methodology. According to the information acquisition of each subject, it was revealed that very few subjects processed the manipulated information disclosed in the footnotes. The MANOVA test revealed that neither the lessee accounting per SFAS 13 nor the time pressure affected loan officers' decisions in terms of credit line and interest rate. The ANOVA test indicated that cue-selection discretion had a significant effect on loan officers' lending decisions when the lessee company capitalized the leases. This study also investigated the impact of time pressure, experience level, and education level on the amount of information processed by the loan officers. The ANOVA results indicated that the incidence of the time pressure, the experience level in evaluating loan applications, and academic degree did not affect the amount of information retrieved by the loan officers.

Pages

156

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_disstheses.4580

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