Higher-Order Beliefs, Market-Based Incentives, and Information Quality
研究了投资者信念相互依赖如何影响企业以市场价格作为业绩衡量指标，进而影响其对财务报告质量的选择，发现羊群市场中会计的受托责任角色被强化。
We investigate how interdependence among investors' beliefs affects the reliance on market prices as a performance measure and how this in turn affects the firm's preference for financial reporting quality. When investors want to align their values more with other investors' beliefs, optimal contracts become more reliant on the accounting report and less on the market price, emphasizing the stewardship role of accounting in a herding market. If the baseline accounting quality required by a reporting standard is high enough, the firm prefers to increase its accounting quality for the sake of contracting efficiency. However, if the baseline quality is low, the firm further lowers accounting quality for the same reason. The benchmark level that determines whether the firm prefers to increase accounting quality increases with the interdependence of investors' beliefs, implying that it is difficult to align the information and stewardship roles of accounting in a herding market.