In this paper, we argue that when individual investors can obtain information from public resources such as Google search, the degree of investor attention to a particular underlying company is positively linked with herding behavior for retail investors. Empirical results confirm that Google Search Volume Index can be a proxy for the information demand of uninformed individual investors. Empirical evidence also shows that reaching the price limit generates an attention-grabbing effect. Further, in general, small cap firms generate more intensive individual investor herding. In addition, we explore the asymmetric impact of abnormal search volume index on individual investor herding behavior for bull and bear markets, and confirm that the individual investor buy herding phenomenon is stronger in bull markets, especially for small capitalization firms. In bear markets, with greater price deterioration for large cap firms, we detect herding behavior on the sell side.

在本文中，我们认为，当个人投资者可以从Google搜索等公共资源中获取信息时，投资者对特定基础公司的关注程度与散户的羊群行为正相关。实证结果证实，Google搜索量指数可以代替不知情的个人投资者的信息需求。经验证据还表明，达到价格限制会产生引人注目的效果。此外，一般而言，小型公司会产生更密集的个人投资者聚集。此外，我们探索了异常搜索量指数对牛市和熊市的个人投资者羊群行为的不对称影响，并确认牛市中个人投资者的购买羊群现象更强，特别是对于小型资本公司。在熊市中，大型上市公司的价格下跌幅度更大，我们发现卖方的羊群行为。