Competing Earnings Announcements: Which Announcement Do Investors Process First?

Abstract

Consistent with investors having limited attention, we posit that when faced with competing earnings announcements, investors behave as if they queue the announcements based on a firm or earnings announcement attribute. We focus on two potential queuing attributes: (1) firm visibility, and (2) the expected cost of processing the earnings announcements. We find no support for queuing based on the latter, but find a statistically significant and economically meaningful queuing effect based on firm visibility. Earnings announcements made by firms that are more visible than a given firm-but not by firms that are less visible-mitigate the announcement window market response to that firm's unexpec..