Feedback loops, fair value accounting and correlated investments

This paper presents and tests a model of the price dynamics that arise when investors fail to recognize the redundancy of unrealized gains and losses (“UGLs”) that are correlated with the firm’s past returns. Consistent with the predictions of our model, our experiment shows that a firm’s prices and earnings become highly volatile when correlated investment is large and correlated UGLs are made salient by comprehensive income reporting. The results suggest that including correlated UGLs in performance numbers could induce violations of weak-form efficiency that exacerbate volatility in share prices and earnings.     

Why We Should Stop Being Surprised that Lightly Regulated Markets Fall Short of the SEC's Goals for Market Quality: A Discussion of “Private Intermediary Innovation and Market Liquidity”

The stated goals of the SEC are to protect investors, maintain orderly markets and facilitate capital formation. These goals can be achieved with very light regulation if, as assumed by traditional economic theory, investors process information costlessly and protect themselves from informational disadvantages, and firms optimally balance the costs and benefits of committing to make their reports reliable. A growing body of research demonstrates that light regulation fails to achieve the SEC's goals, because investors find information processing costly and fail to protect themselves. After reviewing theory and prior evidence, I discuss new lessons learned from Jiang, Petroni, and Wang ( 2016 ), who show that Pink Sheets^® reduced the liquidity of firms with low reporting quality and increased the liquidity of firms with high reporting quality, merely by highlighting the quality of their listed firms’ disclosure. While the Pink Sheets^® innovation might have occurred through many causal channels, all of them entail a violation of costless processing and self‐protection, and lead to the conclusion that this lightly regulated market did not initially meet the stated goals of the SEC. I conclude by arguing that markets can achieve the SEC's goals only if they exhibit a particularly strong version of “dynamic” market efficiency, which requires that each individual trade on the path to even incomplete revelation occurs at the then‐optimal price. Because dynamic efficiency is unlikely, we should stop being surprised to see evidence that lightly regulated markets fall short on key dimensions. Instead, we should use our well‐developed understanding of market inefficiency to guide regulation.     

How Verifiable Cheap-Talk Can Communicate Unverifiable Information

This study describes a “cheap-talk” model in which sellers can credibly convey unverifiable information by choosing whether or not to exaggerate verifiable information. We find that unexaggerated claims can communicate favorable unverifiable information if buyers are not too likely to verify claims, and sellers with better information care more about future prices than sellers with worse information. However, there is always another equilibrium in which sellers exaggerate all verifiable claims. Laboratory tests show that when buyers infrequently verify the sellers' claims, players converge to the equilibria close to the example provided in instructions. When buyers are very likely to verify claims, players fail to converge to any equilibrium. Both of these results are consistent with an evolutionary learning model, but inconsistent with the intuitive criteria of Cho and Kreps (1987). We discuss the implications of our results for both consumer and financial markets. Helpful comments were received by an anonymous reviewer, Mark Nelson, many doctoral students at Cornell University, and Accounting workshop participants at the University of Texas at Austin. JEL Classification: C73, C92, G14, M3     

Experimental research in financial accounting

This paper uses recent experimental studies of financial accounting to illustrate our view of how such experiments can be conducted successfully. Rather than provide an exhaustive review of the literature, we focus on how particular examples illustrate successful use of experiments to determine how, when and (ultimately) why important features of financial accounting settings influence behavior. We first describe how changes in views of market efficiency, reliance on the experimentalist’s comparative advantage, new theories, and a focus on key institutional features have allowed researchers to overcome the criticisms of earlier financial accounting experiments. We then describe how specific streams of experimental financial accounting research have addressed questions about financial communication between managers, auditors, information intermediaries, and investors, and indicate how future research can extend those streams. We focus particularly on (1) how managers and auditors report information; (2) how users of financial information interpret those reports; (3) how individual decisions affect market behavior; and (4) how strategic interactions between information reporters and users can affect market outcomes. Our examples include and integrate experiments that fall into both the “behavioral” and “experimental economics” literatures in accounting. Finally, we discuss how experiments can be designed to be both effective and efficient.     

Confidence and Investors' Reliance on Disciplined Trading Strategies

Researchers and practitioners in accounting and finance often investigate or advocate particular disciplined trading strategies, but little work investigates the determinants of individual investors' trading‐strategy reliance. We report two experiments, which provide evidence that the dual‐source model of overconfidence (Sniezek and Buckley [1991]) predicts the circumstances in which investors are more likely to rely on disciplined trading strategies. Our results indicate that reliance is more likely when investors trade portfolios of securities rather than trading on a case‐by‐case basis, particularly when investors have received feedback that their previous (unaided) trading decisions have been unprofitable. These results are driven by the number of shares that investors transact rather than by investors' directional agreement with the recommendations of the trading strategy, suggesting that the effects of a portfolio approach and trading experience occur by mitigating investors' overconfidence. The effects violate an aspect of economic rationality because our experiments ensure that investors in all conditions trade the same set of securities based on the same set of information.     

Miscellany: An early anticipation of the concept of immiserizing growth

Against the background of brief references to the relevant literature on immiserizing growth, this note calls attention to a hitherto overlooked anticipation of that concept by the English economist G. Poulett Scrope as early as 1831. Scrope's statement, which is reproduced in full, is briefly examined. While not as precise as might be desired, it reveals the author's awareness of the essence of the concept.     

Unregulated Stock Markets in Second Life

SLCapex is a stock exchange owned and operated by “residents” of the online virtual world Second Life. Despite its almost complete lack of regulation and legal protections against fraud or insider trading, issuers were able to raise approximately US$145,000 from investors, which grew to US$900,000 in market value before plummeting, resulting in overall investor returns of ?71%. Investors in large issuances lost more than investors in small issuances, and small investors experienced more severe losses relative to large investors when more money was at stake, indicating that the market did a poor job of protecting investors from issuers and of providing a level playing field for investors. Theories from financial economics can explain the markets' poor performance in the absence of regulatory and legal institutions, but they cannot easily explain why issuers were able to raise capital in such a setting.     

Do Investors Overrely on Old Elements of the Earnings Time Series?*

This paper reports an experiment demonstrating that MBA students overrely on old earnings performance when predicting future earnings performance in a laboratory setting. In the experiment, MBA students relied too heavily on old annual ROE information to predict future annual ROE. The experiment shows how a common cognitive error (overreliance on unreliable information) interacts with the structure of the earnings time series to create particular patterns of prediction errors. The results also suggest directions for research on two well‐known anomalies, long‐run overreactions (De Bondt and Thaler 1985, 1987) and post‐earnings‐announcement drift (Bernard and Thomas 1990).