Behavioral finance began as an attempt to understand why financial markets react inefficiently to public information. One stream of behavioral finance examines how psychological forces induce traders and managers to make suboptimal decisions, and how these decisions affect market behavior....

Analysts and the financial press are often accused of paying too much attention to one another, instead of providing their own independent analyses of fundamental information. Prior research suggests that such mutual observation can render consensus forecasts too extreme, more redundant, and...