The critical global role of audit firms, combined with the scarcity of qualified staff and downward pressure on fees, has increased the importance of understanding efficiency in this industry. This article examines the technical and allocative inefficiencies of audit firm staffing using data from 165 audit engagements performed by a Big 4 international certified public accountant (CPA) firm. Prior research has shown that the technical inefficiency of audit engagements leads to lower billing realization rates on audit engagements. We complement and extend this research by examining whether there are inefficiencies in allocating staff for audit engagements in addition to technical inefficiency, and whether each of these inefficiencies leads to lower billing realization rates. We find that there are differences in both technical and allocative inefficiencies across audit engagements, and that both inefficiencies lead to lower billing realization rates after controlling for other characteristics that could affect the realization rates of the audit engagements.

This paper documents how information technology (IT) impacts audit efforts. Using cross-sectional data on audit engagements for the 100 largest clients of an office of a leading international public accounting firm, it empirically evaluates the impact of the clients’ IT choices on their auditor’s audit effort. The results indicate that other things being equal, the higher level of automation or complexity a client’s IT exhibits, the more effort audit professionals exert for the engagement. On the other hand, the better control or support a client’s IT furnishes, the lower hours the audit team inputs into the engagement.

This paper presents an image resizing system, the purpose is to build an image resizing system based on aesthetic composition including rule of thirds and subject position. With global operations, using the traditional scaling and non-traditional content-aware image resizing do the global operation, supplemented by photo rating for adaptive adjustment to reduce user operation with clear quantitative criteria as a basis for adjustment. In non-traditional content-aware image resizing, two algorithms are used, Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing and Adaptive Content-Aware Image Resizing, to adjust path detection with Otsu's Method according to the above-mentioned algorithm diagram.

We studied how psychological climate can influence performance of members in groups that interact using Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). Drawing on theories in psychology, we conducted an experiment to examine the impact of psychological climate (the individual's perceptions of the environment) on decision-making performance. Controlling for settings of GDSS session, we found that individual performance depended on two dimensions of the psychological climate. First, GDSS users perceiving a higher level of psychological safety made more effective and efficient decisions. Second, GDSS users perceiving higher level of psychological meaningfulness made better decisions if they had a clear understanding of the decision goal. Our study therefore highlighted the importance of individual psychological perceptions in a GDSS context.

Building upon the software quality and productivity literature, we proposed a construct of development quality as the key determinant of software development productivity and product quality. We validated the model by analyzing software project data collected from a benchmarking consortium in India. Our empirical results showed that an increase in development quality was positively associated with increases in both, development productivity and product quality, while we controlled for the impact of other productivity and quality factors. Our work highlighted the importance of concentrating on quality efforts during the development process, which is consistent with the use of Total Quality principles in manufacturing.

We provide a framework to evaluate decision making performance with Group Decision Support Systems (GDSSs) using an overall performance indicator. The indicator is constructed using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which measures the economic efficiency of a decision-making process, or how efficiently a GDSS user converts decision resources into decision outcomes. To illustrate how our framework can be applied, we conduct an experiment that manipulates three contextual factors: communication mode, incentive structure, and group leadership. Within these contexts, we obtain an individual DEA decision efficiency score during the GDSS decision process, where participants are engaged in a mixed-motive task. We find that the communication mode, incentive structure, and interaction between the two significantly influence decision efficiency within this GDSS setting. However, the leadership structure does not have a significant impact on decision efficiency. The current study presents the first application of DEA in the area of GDSS. We illustrate how DEA is useful for evaluating GDSS-supported decision efficiency. The results suggest implications that guide the design of the next generation GDSS to support individuals within collaborative work groups involved in mixed-motive tasks.

This paper documents information technology (IT) impacts that extend across organizational boundaries based on the economic theory. It evaluates how a firm's production cost is affected by the IT decisions of its business partners, over which it has no direct control. Using cross-sectional data on 100 audit engagements for the 100 largest continuing clients of a leading international public accounting firm's main office, it empirically evaluates the impact of the clients’ IT choices on their supplier's (the public accounting firm's) production costs, professional allocations and product prices. The results indicate, other things being equal, that the higher intensity or complexity a client's IT exhibits, the more effort public accounting professionals need to exert, thus, the higher the production cost incurred by the public accounting firm. In contrast, the better documentation or security a client's IT furnishes, the lower the cost the public accounting firm sustains. Furthermore, such differences in production cost are eventually passed on to the client via differences in product price.

Numerous studies have evaluated how a firm’s IT choices affect its production efficiency (Alpar and Kim 1990; Banker et al. 1990; Lee and Menon 2000). However, there has been little attention paid to how the IT choices of one organization affect the costs of other organizations in its value chain. As IT expands the scope of interorganizational linkages in a connected economy, managers must consider how the IT choices of other firms can impact the costs of their firms. This creates a need for further research on the cost impact of the externalities created by IT investment decisions of informationally linked firms. A striking example of such externalities occurs in professional service industries, such as public accounting, where clients’ decisions impact service costs.