Firms with Inconsistently Signed Earnings Surprises: Do Potential Investors Use a Counting Heuristic?
研究发现，当公司盈利表现时好时坏时，潜在投资者会通过统计盈利达标和未达标的次数来区分公司，这种计数行为独立于盈利偏离幅度的影响。
Abstract Although prior research reports that firms that consistently beat their earnings expectations are rewarded with a market‐valuation premium, most firms are inconsistent in the sign of their benchmark performance, sometimes missing and sometimes beating. In this paper, we report the results of multiple experiments to test the idea that potential investors, evaluating firms that have inconsistent benchmark performance, use a counting heuristic to discriminate among them. Our results provide strong support for the hypothesis that these investors distinguish among firms by counting the number of beats and misses they experience over an observed time interval. The judgmental effect of this beat‐frequency is incremental to the effect of the magnitude of the beats and misses of the benchmark. Our study has implications for firm managers who have inconsistent benchmark performance, suggesting that market participants do make systematic discriminations among such inconsistent firms. It also has implications for researchers by introducing a new theoretical construct to the literature—namely, the counting heuristic.