While numerous studies investigate the effect of audit firm characteristics such as auditor size and industry specialization
on the pricing and quality of audits supplied at the client level, few empirical studies examine the effects of competition
through differentiation on audit pricing.
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Thus, while most previous audit fee studies report fee premiums for Big N auditors or
industry specialists, they cannot shed light as to whether such premiums are due to specialized industry knowledge per se and/
or market power effects due to differentiation from competitors. The purpose of our study is to theoretically distinguish
between these two effects and then empirically test both of them. Consistent with Chan (1999), we draw on spatial economics
to provide a theoretical base for competition through differentiation in the audit market and to develop empirical measures
used in our empirical tests.