THE EFFECT OF PRESENTATION FORM ON JUDGMENT CONFIDENCE IN PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
Jan Bell · Journal of Business Finance & Accounting · 1984
This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to determine if a numeric presentation form is associated with high decision confidence and recognition of information consistency. Financial analysts were provided with a description of companies engaged in research and development or production within the chemical industry; financial statements for each company; and comments made by each company's president. These comments contained either numeric or nonnumeric information about the company, and also a statement by the president regarding his satisfaction with that particular year's financial performance. Subjects were requested to evaluate how well each company had performed financially, and were asked to express the confidence they had in the correctness of each of their evaluations. Statistical results show that higher decision confidence is associated with nonnumeric information but that numeric information makes the recognition of information (in) consistency easier.