What Motivates Buy-Side Analysts to Share Recommendations Online?
研究了买方分析师在SumZero.com上分享投资建议的动机，发现声誉激励（如非名校毕业、小基金任职）显著增加分享行为，且分享者更易换工作，其推荐能产生显著回报。
We examine why buy-side analysts share investment ideas on SumZero.com, a private social networking website designed to facilitate interaction and information sharing among buy-side professionals. We explore labor market motivations for information sharing and document that analysts with strong incentives to build a reputation (i.e., those who did not attend a top 10 university and those employed at small funds) are significantly more likely to share recommendations. Our findings indicate that analysts who share ideas are more likely to change jobs and that the likelihood of employment change is positively related to the ratings provided by peers. We also document that analyst recommendations generate significant returns when they are posted on SumZero and that prices drift in the direction of the recommendation. Long-window returns are particularly strong for contrarian buy recommendations and for most sell recommendations. Overall, we show that buy-side analysts share valuable private information in an online social network and that this can be an effective reputation-building and job-seeking tool. This paper was accepted by Mary Barth, accounting.