Original title: Investors’ Preferences for Qualitative Characteristics of Sustainability Disclosures: A Discrete Choice Experiment and an Analysis of Willingness to Pay
The study tests what makes sustainability reports useful to investors. Investors compare disclosures with five qualities, each shown as below requirements, sufficient, or above requirements. Moving from below requirements to sufficient raises perceived usefulness and willingness to payThe amount someone says they would pay for something. for every quality. Going from sufficient to above it helps only for comparability and faithful representation; for the other three, the added value levels off.
Imagine tasting a meal that is too salty, then having the cook bring it to a balanced level. That change matters much more than adding another small improvement once the meal already tastes right. In this paper, the meal’s balance stands for the quality of a sustainability disclosure, and the diners’ reactions stand for investors’ judgments of usefulness and what they would pay.
Investors use sustainability disclosures to make decisions, and standard setters decide what those disclosures should contain. The findings suggest that reaching an adequate level matters across all five qualities, while going beyond it may be worth prioritizing for only some.
The abstract reports limited evidence that a firm's financial performance changes how investors value disclosure quality. It does not provide further details about the experiment or establish how these stated preferences translate into real-world investment decisions.
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Investors’ Preferences for Qualitative Characteristics of Sustainability Disclosures: A Discrete Choice Experiment and an Analysis of Willingness to Pay — Maria Misiuda, Maik Lachmann — Accounting in Europe — doi:10.1080/17449480.2026.2739910
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.