Managing the Workload of the Proxy Season
研究发现，代理季期间（4月底至5月底）机构股东服务公司（ISS）每天处理提案数量激增，导致负面推荐减少且质量下降，表明工作量管理可能损害推荐的信息价值。
About 52 percent of all shareholder meetings happen in the proxy season, a period that lasts from the fourth week of April until the end of May. This concentration leads to an increased workload for Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), the largest proxy advisor, during which time it must make recommendations on an average of 303 proposals each day, compared with 28 proposals outside the proxy season. We find that ISS makes fewer negative recommendations in this busy period and that the recommendations are of lower quality. The evidence is consistent with ISS managing its workload by both increasing the threshold that triggers further investigation of proposals and reducing the time its analysts spend on each proposal. These findings suggest that the clustering of annual meetings in the proxy season may hinder the informativeness of proxy recommendations.