(Reading the previous blog entry is necessary to follow the line of this one!)

so let’s assume today’s thought experiment is about a capital markets paper.  Let’s assume it is one of the many papers that are attempting to incorporate behavioral finance /’psychology insights into a market reaction to accounting information story.  Let us further assume that the authors cited the underlying psychology research, behavioural finance research and standard market in accounting.

But as you note, there is no mention of the experimental financial accounting research!  But this paper used constructs that were used in experimental financial accounting research.  Furthermore, rather than archival proxies for these constructs, the paper used on line people as surrogates for investors making assessments of constructs commonly employed in financial accounting experimental research!

Let’s also assume this paper was presented to a standard accounting audience.  Likely there are a small but vocal minority of experimental accountants in the room!  What would happen if one of those raised the same questions, but from an exclusion of relevant financial accounting experimental research that I suggested would be asked in the previous post?

Questions like:  Do you think the author might have been accused of ignoring important accounting research literature? Do you think there might have been some suggestions that The author was not very competent in the tone of the questions?  that at the very least by ignoring this literature the results could have been much more informed if the literature was cited?

Well this actually happened at a conference I was recently at and, as you might guess, I was the person asking the questions!  What do you think the reaction of the capital markets folks in the audience was??? 

A circling of the wagons around the author with the suggestion that I was not being constructive!  That my wanting citing of on point research was confrontational!  In other words an attempt to silence the critic just like ignoring the citation of relevant experimental financial accounting experiments silences the contribution of this research in this day and age of citation index importance!

A double standard, is it not!   The next post deals with lessons learned ( beyond the well known fact that I ask tough questions with a bit of an attitude)!!!