A large literature in neuroscience and social psychology shows that humans are wired to be meticulous about how they are perceived by others. In this paper, we propose that impression management considerations can also end up guiding the content that investors transmit via word of mouth and inadvertently lead to the propagation of noise. We analyze server log data from one of the largest investment-related websites in the United States. Consistent with our proposition, we find that investors more frequently share articles that are more suitable for impression management despite such articles less accurately predicting returns. Additional analyses suggest that high levels of sharing can lead to overpricing.

神经科学和社会心理学方面的大量文献表明，人类天生就对他人如何看待自己非常谨慎。在本文中，我们提出印象管理的考虑也可能最终引导投资者通过口耳相传的方式传播内容，并在不经意间导致噪音的传播。我们分析来自美国最大的投资相关网站之一的服务器日志数据。与我们的主张一致，我们发现投资者更频繁地分享更适合印象管理的文章，尽管这些文章不太准确地预测回报。其他分析表明，高水平的共享会导致定价过高。