Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda? The Impact of Predictive, Prescriptive, and Prospective Expectations on Stakeholder Reactions

When and why might stakeholders react to firm activities in ways that might be different than, or even contradictory to, what we might expect based on the extant research? We draw on expectancy violation theory (EVT) and bring in the notion of heuristics and future-oriented expectations to examine this question, using a sample of investor reactions to earnings surprises from 2013 to 2019. We find that, in addition to comparing earnings to consensus earnings estimates, investors appear to compare the earnings surprises to the firm’s past performance and to its peers. Importantly, their expectations regarding future interactions with the firm appear to shape their decisions and generate anticipatory reactions despite a lack of full certainty about the future—a point notably absent from the EVT literature so far, which has tended to be reactive. Numerous robustness checks and post hoc analyses indicate that this behavior is driven not necessarily by unsophisticated investors, as initially predicted, but seemingly by institutional investors who rely on these multiple expectations, even though that may not be entirely rational. Our theorizing and findings make several contributions to the EVT literature, and offer practical insights for managers and investors.