All That Glitters: The Effect of Attention and News on the Buying Behavior of Individual and Institutional Investors
Brad M. Barber Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis
Terrance Odean Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
We test and confirm the hypothesis that individual investors are net buyers of attention- grabbing stocks, e.g., stocks in the news, stocks experiencing high abnormal trading volume, and stocks with extreme one-day returns. Attention-driven buying results from the difficulty that investors have searching the thousands of stocks they can potentially buy. Individual investors do not face the same search problem when selling because they tend to sell only stocks they already own. We hypothesize that many investors consider purchasing only stocks that have first caught their attention. Thus, preferences determine choices after attention has determined the choice set.
You have time to read only a limited number of research papers. How did you choose to read this paper? Investors have time to weigh the merits of only a limited number of stocks. Why do they consider some stocks and not others? In making a decision, we first select which options to consider and then decide which of those options to choose. Attention is a scarce resource. When there are many alternatives, options that attract attention are more likely to be considered, hence more likely to be chosen, while options that do not attract attention are often ignored. If the salient attributes of an option are critical to our utility, attention may serve us well. If not, attention may lead to suboptimal
We appreciate the comments of Jonathan Berk, David Blake, Ken French, Simon Gervais, John Griffin, Andrew Karolyi, Sendhil Mullainathan, Mark Rubinstein, and Brett Trueman. We also appreciate the comments of seminar participants at Arizona State University; the Behavioral Decision Research in Management Conference; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Irvine; the Copenhagen Business School; Cornell University; Emory; HEC; Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration; Ohio State University; Osaka University; the Q Group; the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics; the Stockholm School of Economics; the University of Tilburg; Vanderbilt; the Wharton School; the CEPR/JFI symposium at INSEAD; Mellon Capital Management; the National Bureau of Economic Research; the Risk Perceptions and Capital Markets Conference at Northwestern University; and the European Finance Association Meeting. We are grateful to the Plexus Group, to BARRA, to Barclays Global Investors—for the Best Conference Paper Award at the 2005 European Finance Association Meeting, to the retail broker and discount brokers who provided us with the data for this study, and to the Institute for Quantitative Research and the National Science Foundation (grants SES-0111470 and SES-0222107) for financial support. Shane Shepherd, Michael Foster, and Michael Bowers provided valuable research assistance. All errors are our own. Address correspondence to Terrance Odean, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1900; telephone: 510-642-6767; e-mail: [email protected].