Journal article
The effect of incidental name similarity on favoritism in the Chinese financial market
- Abstract:
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Incidental similarities between individuals can sway professional judgment, sometimes resulting in people overstepping legal or ethical boundaries. Recent research on the US financial sector indicates that incidental name similarities between CEOs and securities analysts induce favoritism and lead to more accurate earnings forecasts, likely by facilitating unfair private information disclosure. This study investigates similar phenomena in China using richer datasets, including records of face-to-face interactions between analysts and company executives during corporate site visits. Interestingly, while the results confirm that Chinese analysts who share surnames with company executives exhibit favoritism, this favoritism manifests as overly optimistic earnings forecasts after corporate site visits. This is particularly notable with less common surnames. Our findings highlight the cultural specificity of surname-driven biases in social interactions.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.7MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41598-025-97364-x
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Scientific Reports More from this journal
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 13077
- Publication date:
- 2025-04-16
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-04-03
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2045-2322
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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2118910
- Local pid:
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pubs:2118910
- Deposit date:
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2025-04-24
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Mao et al
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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