Regulators express concerns with investors’ unquestioning reliance on analysts’ recommendations, which prior research has shown to be associated with lower trading returns. Thus, regulators have published investor guides advising investors to conduct independent research and required analyst...

We conduct three experiments to investigate whether and why investors rely on analysts' stock recommendations, and how to mitigate potential overreliance. In Experiments 1 and 2, we find that investors who receive a buy (sell) recommendation judge a company to have higher (lower) investment...