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The effect of mobile device use and headline focus on investor judgments

TIMOTHY J. BROWN¹; Stephanie M. Grant²; Amanda Winn³

¹ University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · ² University of Washington · ³ Portland State University

This study conducts two experiments to examine how investors’ judgments differ when they read a press release using either a mobile device or a computer. Results show that when investors use a mobile device, information related to a specific headline (mentioning a specific part of the news like “net income” or “revenue”) influences their investment judgments more than when investors use a computer. This effect is robust to specific headlines that focus on either positive or negative information. In contrast, investors’ judgments do not differ when they use a mobile device compared to a computer and the headline is general (using the broad term “results”). We replicate our findings in a second experiment and provide evidence that the observed effect occurs because investors who use their mobile device are in a more distracted frame of mind, which in turn increases the influence of prominent information. Our results suggest that managers’ presentation choices may have a greater influence on investors as they increasingly rely on mobile devices to research and execute investment decisions.

DOI

10.1016/j.aos.2019.101100

Volume

83

Pages

101100

Language

en

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BibTeX

Sources

semanticscholar openalex crossref