5 Going forward
We argue that researchers in the empirical auditing literature can make progress by applying commonly used techniques in the industrial organization and quantitative marketing fields. Both of these fields address questions similar to those in the auditing literature (e.g., the level of competition in a market, the relationship between competition in a market and the quality of goods and services offered in the market, the effect of regulation on the level of competition, and the dynamics of pricing), and they have developed empirical methods to address these questions. Yet there is at present a disconnect between the auditing literature and these literatures. One manifestation of this is an overreliance on hedonic price regressions. By contrast, (Guo et al. 2017) provide an excellent example of applying techniques from industrial organization and quantitative marketing to address an important question in the auditing literature that cannot be addressed by estimating an audit fee regression. We encourage more such studies.
