The Effects of Time Pressure and Knowledge on Key Word Selection Behavior in Tax Research

This paper considers how time pressure and knowledge separately and jointly affect tax researchers' ability to locate relevant authority. Tax profession als and graduate tax students participated in a computer interactive experiment in which subjects selected relevant key words relating to a partnership tax issue. The results indicate that declarative and procedural knowledge enhance tax researchers' ability to select relevant key words in a time-restricted task. The most significant finding is that subjects with procedural knowledge responded more positively to time pressure than did subjects without such knowledge, thereby demonstrating an interaction between time pressure and knowledge.