Analyst Earnings Forecasts, Individual Investors’ Expectations and Trading Volume: An Experimental Approach

This paper studies how analysts’ earnings forecasts affect investors’ expectations and trading decisions. From an experiment built on a double-auction market, we find that investors partially incorporate the forecasting information in their expectations and trading decisions. Investors partly correct for analysts’ forecast errors and their expectations are less heterogeneous than analysts’ forecasts. As for the trading volume, it is negatively driven by the heterogeneity of the analysts’ forecasts but positively by the size of the forecast errors.
Keywords: Analysts’ Forecasts; Investor Expectations; Trading Volume; Experimental Asset Market; Earnings Announcement.
JEL Codes: C91; G12; M41.