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The purpose of this study is to examine the role of financial and nonfinancial information in determining individual investor's investment decisions by analyzing the mediating effect of corporate reputation.

The approach of this study is deductive; therefore, the quantitative strategy is used for data collection. Primary data are collected from individual investors actively involved in stock trading at Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX). Structural equation modeling is used to assess structural relationships.

The key findings of this study posit that financial and nonfinancial information positively influence an individual investor's investment decision. This study also provides empirical evidence confirming the mediating role of corporate reputation. Categorically, the findings indicate that financial and nonfinancial information remain significant to build perceived corporate reputation and influence investor's investment decisions.

he proposed model presents novel insight into the individual investor's investment decision in the context of Pakistan. The findings of this study remain robust for firms listed on the stock exchange and individual investors involved in stock trading. The results of this study are substantial to individual investor's and broker for making informed financial choices. Moreover, the firms listed on the PSX can use the findings to establish improved corporate reputation through reporting detailed financial and nonfinancial information.

Studies based on subjective measures in finance are lacking. This study contributes to the existing literature of behavioral finance by analyzing variations in investor's investment decisions explained by informational factors. The proposed model testifies the mediating role of corporate reputation in guiding investor's investment decisions, which has been overlooked by past studies. Therefore, this study seeks to fill this gap in the context of the PSX.

The purpose of this paper is to examine preferences of Chinese individual and institutional investors to cash dividends and stock dividends. Using categorized daily holding information from the TOPVIEW database, the authors test how percentage holdings of individuals and institutional investors change, respectively, around annual report dates and registration dates.

The results show that individuals and institutional investors often express heterogeneous preferences to dividends. After controlling for firm size and market performance, the authors find that the higher the ratio of stock dividend is, the more likely institutional investors will increase their overall holdings of the stock-dividend-paying firm in the week after annual report date, but they do not prefer to do so around registration dates. Meanwhile, the higher the ratio of stock dividend is, the more likely individual investors will increase their overall holdings of the stock-dividend-paying firm in the week before registration date, but do not prefer to do so after annual report dates. Such patterns do not exist for cash-dividend-paying firms.

The results imply that different types of investors chase high stock-dividend-paying firms at different stages of dividend events. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis of “price illusion,” but do not lend support to the signaling hypothesis of stock dividends.

This paper uses categorized data of daily share holdings to test how different types of minority shareholders respond to stock dividends and cash dividends for the first time. It sheds lights on the on-going academic debate about the “stock dividend puzzle” in China.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether there is any difference across individual investors, domestic and foreign institutional investors in trading volume responses to analyst reports. The authors also examine the determinants of trading volume responses using firm as well as forecast characteristics.

The authors use trading data from the Korean equity market. The authors divide investors into three classes of investors; namely, individual investors, domestic institutional investors, and foreign institutional investors. The authors then examine whether the trading responses to analyst reports vary across investor types, and how firm characteristics and characteristics of analyst reports influence the trading activities on the release dates across investor types.

Individual investors are the most responsive investor group, being responsive to analyst reports on small, neglected firms with large inside ownership as well as to analyst reports with optimistic forecasts. Domestic institutional investors are responsive to reports on neglected firms with high return volatility while foreign institutional investors show least responses.

There are few studies that investigate whether the trading responses to analyst reports vary across investor types and how firm characteristics and characteristics of analyst reports influence the trading activities on the release dates across investor types. Taking advantage of the trading volume data for the three main investor types in the Korean stock market, the authors study the trading volume responses for each investor type and make comparisons across investor types.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an in-depth contextualized understanding of individual investors’ buying decision in Indian stock market. Specifically, it provides answers to: how do individual investors make buying decision in stock market; and how and when do biases set in during such decisions. The paper also brings forward some aspects of individual’s journey as an investor.

Given the exploratory nature of this study, the paper takes a step away from typically used variance approach and instead uses a process approach. The authors do in-depth one-on-one interview, where each respondent shares his/her lived experiences as an investor retrospectively. To understand buying decision, each respondent is asked to elaborate three significant buying transactions carried out by him/ her in stock market.

Socio-cultural factors are found to have significant influence in inducing respondents to enter market. “Safe” vs “Risky” mental account emerges as the prominent stock categorization done by Indian investors. Three building blocks, namely, Identification, Rationalization and Further Validation emerge as the building blocks that culminate into buying decision of individual investors. The biases are seen to play a dual role in such decisions; as Attention Boosters and Rationales.

This study, to the best of authors’ knowledge, is first of its kind which amalgamates behavioral biases with phenomenon such as attention and Rationalization, to understand “how” behavioral biases set in during buying decision of individual investors.

This paper investigates individual investors' responses to stock underpricing and how their trading decisions are affected by analysts' forecasts and recommendations.

This empirical study uses mutual fund fire sales as an exogenous source that causes stock underpricing and analysts' forecasts and recommendations as price-correcting information. The study further uses regression analysis to examine individual investors' responses to fire sales and how their responses vary with price-correcting information.

The authors first show that individual investors respond to mutual fund fire sales by significantly decreasing net buys, and this effect appears to be prolonged. Next, the authors find that the decrease of net buys diminishes following analysts' price-correcting earnings forecast revisions and stock recommendation changes. Hence, the authors suggest that individual investors are not “wise” enough to recognize flow-driven underpricing; however, this response is weakened by analysts' price-correcting information.

There is an ongoing debate in the literature about whether individual investors should be portrayed as unsophisticated traders or informed traders who can predict future returns. The authors study a unique information event and provide new evidence related to both perspectives. Overall, our evidence suggests that the “unsophisticated traders” perspective is predominant, whereas a better information environment significantly reduces individual investors' information disadvantage. This finding could be of interest to both academic researchers and regulators.

This paper investigates whether individual investors are attentive to stock splits and whether higher split ratios (stronger private information signals) reduce the disposition effect.

This study employs stock split events and transaction data in the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) from January 2004 to December 2017. The authors measure individual investors' attention using buy-initiated trades. To test the effect of split signal on disposition effect, the authors regress individual investors' sell-initiated trades on past stock returns.

Unlike Birru (2015), the authors find that individual investors are attentive to stock splits, especially when stock split ratios are high. In turn, stock splits tend to weaken the disposition effect. The higher the stock split ratios, the weaker the disposition effect.

This study has a limitation in that the authors exclude all stock splits with dividend events around the split date. These stock splits cover 37% of all splits in Indonesia.

Practically, individual investors should look for stock-related information to reduce disposition bias.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to test individual investors' attention on stock splits based on their buy-initiated trades. This study is also the first to test the impact of stock split ratios on the disposition effect reduction. This study's findings enrich the scant literature on individual investors' attention and how to reduce their disposition effect bias.

The main thrust of the present study is to look into the trading patterns of behavior and investment performance exhibited by individual and institutional investor categories in the Qatar Exchange (QE). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The present study uses daily aggregated investment flows made separately by each investor group, as well as daily closing price observations of the QE stock composite index. The trading patterns of investor categories are examined by estimating a bivariate vector autoregressive process of order p, VAR (p). To determine whether each category performs well or poorly over the entire sample period, each investor category's cumulative returns are estimated and analyzed.

The empirical results reveal that institutional investors pursue positive feedback trading strategies, whereas individual investors tend to be negative feedback traders. Both investor categories appear to be engaged in herding behavior. Additionally, institutional investors perform well over almost the entire sample period. In contrast, individual investors' negative market timing ability dominates their overall poor performance.

The investment performance gap found between institutional investors and individual investors in the Qatari capital market may reflect a large information asymmetry in favour of the former category. Indeed, the poor performance of individual investors implies that their trading activities are generally driven by factors and considerations that are irrelevant to fundamentals. Moreover, their irrational trading decisions may play some role in the formation of asset price bubbles.

The present study makes the first attempt to provide empirical evidence on the investment patterns and performance of individual and institutional investors trading on the Qatari capital market.

Building brand loyalty has become more important, yet more difficult to achieve in today's marketplace. This research investigates a possible avenue for building brand loyalty that is not directly related to the marketing of the product – attracting individual investors in the brand's corporate parent. A survey of over 500 individual investors revealed that individual investors do tend to buy brands from companies in which they hold stock, and investors may buy stock in a company because they have experience with the brand. In contrast with brand loyalty, where consumers will not buy competitive offerings, individual investors indicated they would buy competitive offerings, suggesting that stock ownership is more likely to lead to repeat purchase behavior, but not brand loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the interaction between the availability of financial information and individuals' cognitive profiles to explain investors' herding behavior.

The authors designed and conducted an experiment to observe the behavior of subjects in three settings, each with a different level of information.

Results confirm that a dependence relation exists between information, investors' behavioral biases and the herding phenomenon. Moreover, the experiment shows that information concerning the number of previous transactions in the market is particularly relevant to explain herding propensity among investors. The findings indicate that the cognitive profile of investors is more relevant as the availability of information increases and the number of previous transactions in the market is low.

Future research should examine further the best way to measure the individual's cognitive profile and its interaction with information limitation in financial markets. The presence of high levels of uncertainty favors herding behavior regardless of inter‐individual differences, and only when the availability of information is high and the number of transactions is low does the subjects' cognitive profile explain the investors' herding behavior. Finally, it is observed that not all public information receives the same attention by investors. The attractiveness of public information requires further attention.

The herding phenomenon is difficult to anticipate because there are factors of a very diverse nature that intervene.

The research described in this paper measures investors' cognitive profile to identify the interaction between availability of information, cognitive profile and herding.

For this study, the authors document day-of-the-week trading patterns of individual investors using a unique data set of NYSE-listed firms and discuss their influence on the Monday effect. It is found that Monday stock returns are generally lower than those of other weekdays and, on average, negative. Unlike previous researchers, the authors use actual trading data for individual investors rather than proxies to measure individual investor activity, such as the percentage of odd-lot trading. The results demonstrate that the trading activity of individual investors on Mondays is lower than previously documented. This finding contradicts the long-held belief that individual investors are most active on Mondays. In addition, the authors find that individual investors’ trading activity during the week broadly follows corporate announcement patterns. The least amount of firm-specific information is released on Friday, followed by Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Wednesday. Accordingly, individual investors trade the least number of shares on Friday, followed by Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Wednesday, strengthening the argument that individual investors trade on attention-grabbing stocks. Taken together, the authors’ findings challenge those of previous studies that hold individual investors responsible for the Monday effect. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors use actual trading data for individual investors rather than proxies to measure individual investor activity, such as the percentage of odd-lot trading, to study the existence of Monday effect in stock prices.

The results show that the trading activity of individual investors on Mondays is lower than previously documented. This finding contradicts the long-held belief that individual investors are most active on Mondays. In addition, the authors find that individual investors’ trading activity during the week broadly follows corporate announcement patterns.

The authors find that individual investors’ trading activity during the week broadly follows corporate announcement patterns. The least amount of firm-specific information is released on Friday, followed by Monday. Accordingly, individual investors trade the least number of shares on Friday, followed by Monday, strengthening the argument that individual investors trade on attention-grabbing stocks. Taken together, the authors’ findings challenge those of previous studies that hold individual investors responsible for the Monday effect.

Financial advisors.

The authors find that individual investors’ trading activity during the week broadly follows corporate announcement patterns. The authors challenge the commonly hold view that individuals often make trading decisions during weekends and thus trade on Mondays, and find that the least amount of firm-specific information is released on Friday, followed by Monday. Accordingly, individual investors trade the least number of shares on Friday, followed by Monday. Taken together, the authors’ findings challenge those of previous studies that hold individual investors responsible for the Monday effect.