Limited Attention: Implications for Financial Reporting

I develop a theory to study the consequences of providing more detailed information to rationally inattentive investors. I first consider a simple data-provision problem and show that adding more data or detail in financial statements can make it more difficult for investors to extract information. Consequently, investors who have limited information-processing capacity may prefer less detailed information. I also show that when investors' decisions are complements, providing details in addition to a summary may reduce investors' welfare. More specifically, because of increased disclosure of details, a coordination failure could occur in investors' attention-allocation decisions. By showing that adding more detail in financial statements can lead to an information overload problem for investors, this study yields valuable insights for accounting standard setters.