집단소송과 회계 및 감사의 품질

The purpose of this study is to analytically investigate the effect of securities class action on the quality of accounting and auditing. The introduction of securities class action is expected to increase litigation incentives of investors suffered losses due to incorrect reports, and to decrease contingent legal fees per suitor by the cost sharing effect. Three equilibrium strategies and equations thereof are presented based on the model of Dopuch and King(1992). Especially, this paper modified the buyers' equilibrium suing strategy to reflect the effect of contingent legal fees incurred by buyers who suffer losses and decide to sue. An essential point of this study is what effects will securities class action have on a Nash equilibrium solutions; the truthfulness of corporate reporting, the verification level of auditor, the reliability of accounting, the bid price of dividend-paying asset, and the managers' incentive for costly investment. The analyses show that the potential effects on litigation incentives and contingent legal fees of the enforcement of securities class action can help to reduce the malpractices of business reporting and to improve the quality of accounting greatly, despite of the increase of auditors' shirk theirby. The results also show that the enforcement of securities class action may have very little, if any, stock price revaluation effect and may have no effect on the managers' incentive for costly investment.