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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the presentation medium of corporate social and environmental web site disclosure has an impact on user trust in such disclosure, and to examine the effect of media richness on user perception about corporate social and environmental responsibility. Design/methodology/approach -The paper's methodology is a three-by-two between-subjects design experiment, manipulating presentation medium and industry type. Participants viewed social and environmental web site disclosures and completed and communicated their perceptions of trust and the experimental companies' corporate social responsibility. Findings -The presentation medium richness of social and environmental web site disclosures is positively associated with: trusting intentions, but not trusting beliefs, of web site users; and user perception of corporate social and environmental responsibility. Research limitations/implications -As with all controlled experiments, the research design focused on internal validity to maintain control over the task design, manipulation, and measurement of variables. While this required trade-offs with external validity, the task was designed based on real-world scenarios to maintain high levels of external validity within the experimental setting. Practical implications -The paper provides evidence that corporations could use enhanced web-based technology to potentially mislead users regarding their performance in the social domain. Originality/value -The paper extends the visual disclosure literature by examining the richness of the image/visual media, and investigates whether user perceptions are impacted by the variations in its richness.

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A primary responsibility of tax professionals is to be an advocate for their clients (AICPA 2000). Prior studies have shown mixed results on how the advocate role influences tax professionals’ decision processes and outcomes (e.g., Cloyd and Spilker 1999; Davis and Mason 2003; Barrick et al. 2004; Kahle and White 2004). In this study, we consider how advocacy may be at least partially context-specific, introduce the construct of client-specific advocacy, and thoroughly examine the influence of advocacy attitudes on a number of steps in the judgment and decision-making process. Consistent with attitude theory, we report experimental results that suggest client characteristics influence tax professionals’ advocacy attitudes. We also find that client-specific advocacy influences process variables such as the weighting of evidence and decision outcomes such as the recommendation of tax advice. The results of the study indicate that tax professionals may be unintentionally influenced by client attributes when making judgments and may have difficulty separating their advocacy and evidence evaluation roles.