Finally, our theory and findings, which pertain to individual analysts’
judgments of expected market mispricing, help bridge previous research
that documents greater transparency, improving individual choice behavior
(e.g., Tversky and Kahneman [1987]) but impeding the price-adjustment
process in laboratory market settings (Smith [1991, 2002]). Although some
researchers from an economics tradition who are familiar with the mathematical
models of, for example, Abreu and Brunnermeier [2002, 2003] or
Allen, Morris, and Shin [2006] and related laboratory markets (e.g., Anctil
et al. [2004]) would consider it obvious that greater transparency can lead
to greater expectations of mispricing, other researchers from a psychology
tradition would tend to be surprised (e.g., Hirst and Hopkins [1998], Hirst,
Hopkins, and Wahlen [2004]). We document that individual judgments
within the context of a one-shot experiment can nevertheless demonstrate
this counter-intuitive finding, relying (as do the aforementioned economic
models) on the notion of Keynesian beauty contests (Keynes [1936, p.
154–155]) and higher-order beliefs (i.e., beliefs about what others believe),
based on the interaction of a firm’s accounting disclosures transparency
and its investor base.