We investigate the impact of social media messages on nonprofessional investors' assessments of management credibility and firm value. In a between-participants experiment, we examine the joint effect of social media message vividness, valence, and micro-blogger influence on nonprofessional investors' assessments of management credibility and firm value. We find that when social media messages are pallid and negative (positive), high micro-blogger influence decreases (increases) nonprofessional investors' assessments of management credibility. In contrast, the effect is absent when messages are vivid. Further, we find that the effect of micro-blogger influence on nonprofessional investors' assessments of blogger credibility and management credibility is mediated by social media interactions. The assessment of management credibility, in turn, significantly impacts nonprofessional investors' firm valuation assessment. The results have implications for regulators (SEC 2013) that may wish to update their guidance to managers on how to monitor or even control nonprofessional investors' interaction on social media platforms.
Data Availability: Contact the authors.
Advances in IT suggest that computerized intelligent agents (IAs) may soon occupy many roles that presently employ human agents. A significant concern is the ethical conduct of those who use IAs, including their possible utilization by managers to engage in earnings management. We investigate how financial reporting decisions are affected when they are supported by the work of an IA versus a human agent, with varying autonomy. In an experiment with experienced managers, we vary agent type (human vs. IA) and autonomy (more vs. less), finding that managers engage in less aggressive financial reporting decisions with IAs than with human agents, and engage in less aggressive reporting decisions with less autonomous agents than with more autonomous agents. Managers' perception of control over their agent and ability to diffuse their own responsibility for financial reporting decisions explain the effect of agent type and autonomy on managers' financial reporting decisions. Results imply the adoption of computerized intelligent agents can attenuate managers' earnings management activity by preventing them from placing responsibility for their actions on others.
Regulators have expressed concerns over management's ability to maintain effective ICFR when adopting cloud-computing services (PCAOB 2015), as well as the auditor's ability to cope with such changes (PCAOB 2015, 2017). Further, the complexity of the client's accounting concepts, proxied by their XBRL taxonomy, could adversely impact financial reporting quality. We investigate the association between a firm's disclosure of cloud-computing risks and its likelihood of disclosing a material weakness, moderated by its level of accounting reporting complexity. We find that, for firms that identify cloud-computing as a significant risk, the external auditor is less likely to issue a material weakness when the firm uses a greater number of customized XBRL tags. We also find that the external auditor is more likely to issue a material weakness for firms that do not identify cloud-computing as a significant risk to their operations when they use a greater number of customized XBRL tags.
Data Availability: Data are publicly available from sources identified in the paper.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.