The audit fee may reveal the audit quality because higher auditing practices usually require more audit time and resources and thus a higher audit fee is charged to the audit client (Moizer, 1992).
The hidden in efficiency cost and excessive gain in audit fee proposal are debatable.
If the audited companies can pay for high audit fee and they found their auditors as value-for-money audit,
they still use the service from that auditor. Thus, audit fee could be an indirect measure of audit quality. In contrast, lower quality auditors can propose very low audit fees in order to keep clients and are so-called price-cutters. This is the practice of low-balling where the auditors set the initial audit fee at below the start-up costs in the first year of
audit work (DeAngelo 1981a, 1981b) in order to win the bid from the potential client and gain the client specific
quasi-rents