Hyperlinking Unaudited Information to Audited Financial Statements: Effects on Investor Judgments
通过实验发现，将未经审计的信息超链接到已审计的财务报表会使投资者混淆两者，高估未经审计信息的可信度并影响盈利判断，而明确标注“已审计/未审计”可减轻此影响。
This study provides evidence that hyperlinking a firm's audited financial statements to unaudited information in a web-based environment leads investors to blend the unaudited information with the audited statements. I obtain evidence of this blending effect using an experiment where investors assessed a firm's earnings potential by evaluating the firm's audited financial statements and a subsequent optimistic unaudited letter to shareholders from the firm's management. Investors who viewed hyperlinked materials on the Web misclassified more unaudited information as audited and assessed the credibility of the unaudited information as higher than did investors who viewed hardcopy materials. Those investors who assessed the unaudited information as more credible also judged the firm's earnings potential to be higher. Notifying users with an “AUDITED/NOT AUDITED” label attenuated these effects. This evidence suggests that firms can influence financial report users' perceptions by hyperlinking unaudited information to information in their audited financial statements, and that a simple disclosure rule reduces this influence.