The Effect of Manager’s Risk Attitude and Expectations on Fraudulent Financial Reporting: Evidence from Game Theory

Objective: Corruption and fraud are two of the most important chllenges in each society. Fraud is any deliberate and deceptive act by one or more of the executives، employees or third parties to enjoy an undue or illegal advantage and includes two distortions resulting from fraudulent financial reporting and misuse of assets.
In the literature, the effect of various factors on fraudulent financial reporting has been studied, However, the influence of behavioral dimensions has not been. Managers personality properties and behavioral characteristics are affecting factor on corrupt actions of managers. This study seeks to investigate the effect of manager's risk attitude and expectations on fraudulent financial reporting  and this is the reason why this study is included in behavioral stydies which examine the effect of behavioral properties on different variables.
It is the manager who decides whether or not to commit reporting fraud. If the manager chooses cheating, there is a chance that the fraud will be discovered. As a result, this decision is made under uncertainty because if fraud is not detected, the manager will gain more benefits, but discovering it can cause loss of the manager's interests and reputation.
Method: In this study, game theory was used. Game theory as a branch of mathematics has been introduced into the social sciences in the study of situations of social interactions. When the word "game"is used, it means any social situation that involves at least two players in which the interests of the parties are connected or interdependent.
Game theory attempts to model the mathematical behavior governing a strategic situation. This occurs when the success of one side of the game depends on the strategies that the other side chooses. The ultimate goal of this knowledge is to find the optimal strategy for players.  Accordingly, the reporting process is also the kind of game that managers play against users. The interests of each individual in the game are not only dependent on their own behavior, but also on the behavior of other players. As a result، the achievable utility of the player depends on the opponent's play.
An experimental investigation and a cooperative game were made in this study. In the game, the players must be decided whether to engage in fraudulent behavior or not, in terms of their expectations. lottery choices were used to elicit players' risk attitude and direct belief elicitation to elicit players' beliefs. The game is done in 8 round. Finally, logistic regression was utilized to analyze data.
Results: It is observed that the risk attitude of the players failed to explain their choices between earnings management and honest reporting. Instead, their expectations appeared to be a better predictor of their decision.
In addition, among other variables that have been known to influence cheating are the gender of the manager and professional background of the manager. Moreover, people are more inclined to cheat when faced with a real profit management scenario. The behavior of managers in the last round of the game does not differ significantly from their behavior in other rounds. Morover, manager gender and his/her professional experience are among other variables affecting on doing the fraud. Based on findings, if manager is a man, he is highly likely to do fraud in comparison with a woman. In addition, manager,s experience has negative effect on fraud. It means that more having experience prevents manager to enagage in fraud.
Conclusion: According to the obtained results, if a person expects to do more fraudulent actions by others, he is likely to do it too. As a result, it can be said that the more common and accepted an action is among the members of a society, and the more people who do it, the more people are encouraged to do it. In other words, the more common fraud is among managers, the more widespread corruption becomes, and other managers will turn to opportunistic behavior. One of the main problems of our country and all societies around the world is the penetration of these kinds of destructive behaviors in different layers of society (not necessarily managers). In the event of repetition and epidemic, such behaviors will gradually become a social norm in the society and the number of corrupt and dishonest people who prefer their personal interests to the interests of a large group of stakeholders such as shareholders of the company.
Moreover, according to the findings, if the manager is male, it has a positive impact on the conduct of fraud. Meanwhile, the manager's professional background has a significant reverse effect on fraud. So the more professional history the manager has, the less likely he is to cheat.
Inaddition, the results showed that the majority of frauds were done in the form of real profit management. The amount of cheating performed in the last round did not differ significantly with the average of cheats performed in the previous rounds. Therefore, it cannot be concluded that the increase in the number of cheats in the last round of the game reflects the increased tendency to cheat in the last round of managers' tenure.