Are MBA Students a Good Proxy for Non-professional Investors?

We investigate a key assumption underlying much of the experimental research in financial accounting that graduate business students are a good proxy for non-professional investors. To conduct our investigation, we categorize recent experimental studies in financial accounting based on the relative level of integrative complexity inherent in each study's task. We then conduct experiments using two tasks, one that is relatively low in integrative complexity and one that is relatively high in integrative complexity, and compare the responses of two groups of MBA students and non-professional investors.