EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The effects of a reasonable investor perspective and firm's prior disclosure policy on managers' disclosure judgments

Diane Mayorga and Ken T. Trotman

Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2016, vol. 53, issue C, 50-62

Abstract: Security laws and accounting standards suggest that reasonable investors' expectations are an important consideration for disclosure judgments. Regulators have expressed concerns that many disclosure judgments are made without adequate consideration of how investors would evaluate the information. However, the psychological literature suggests that individuals may face difficulties considering the facts from another's perspective. We conduct two experiments to examine whether prompting managers to take the perspective of a reasonable investor affects their disclosure recommendations of a probable negative change in their company's earnings expectations, and whether this effect is impacted by the firm's prior disclosure policy (known that its past preference to be biased towards no disclosure versus unknown). We find that experienced managers are more likely to recommend disclosure when they are prompted to take the perspective of a reasonable investor than when they are not and this effect is stronger when the firm's prior disclosure policy is unknown.

Keywords: Disclosure policy; Perspective taking; Reasonable investor; Reasonable person (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361368215000914
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:53:y:2016:i:c:p:50-62

DOI: 10.1016/j.aos.2015.10.003

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Organizations and Society is currently edited by Christopher Chapman

More articles in Accounting, Organizations and Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:53:y:2016:i:c:p:50-62