Communication is playing a central part of requirement determination (RD), particularly given that the many human interfaces associated with RD can lead to a variety of communication challenges, including miscommunication between users and analysts and misunderstandings between analysts and developers, all of which can add time and cost to software projects. This paper describes analysts-users ...

In this study, we examine the determinants of the well-documented optimism in analysts’ target prices using unique analyst location and institutional data for 11,633 analysts located in 44 countries covering 17,353 firms around the world. We construct both ex ante and ex post optimism measures to explore the factors that influence analyst target price optimism. We find that target price optimis...

Intrusion detection (ID) systems have become increasingly accepted as an essential layer in the information security infrastructure. However, there has been little research into understanding the human component of ID work. Currently, security analysts face an increasing workload as their environments expand and attacks become more frequent. We conducted contextual interviews with security anal...

Requirements elicitation techniques are methods used by analysts to determine the needs of customers and users, so that systems can be built with a high probability of satisfying those needs. Analysts with extensive experience seem to be more successful than less experienced analysts in uncovering the user needs. Less experienced analysts often select a technique based on one of two reasons: (a...

We examine whether strong relations between managers and analysts lead to analysts “following” the managers to new firms. Specifically, we investigate sell-side analyst coverage decisions in the context of CEO and CFO moves between publicly listed firms. We find that top executive moves from an origin firm to a destination firm often trigger analysts following the origin firm to initiate covera...

We examine analysts’ motives to issue long-term earning growth (LTG) forecasts. We find that analysts are more likely to issue LTG forecasts when their incentive to please managers is strong. In addition, analysts are more likely to choose firms that they are more optimistic about for LTG coverage. We find mixed evidence regarding whether analysts issue LTG forecasts to signal their ability or ...

Managers often provide self-serving disclosures that blame poor corporate financial performance on temporary, external factors. For example, many managers have pointed to the September 11th terrorist attacks and the downturn in the economy as explanations for their firm’s poor performance over the past year. Little is known about how financial analysts respond to such disclosures. Results of an...

We find that market reactions to an analyst’s earnings forecasts are weaker when conditioned on the number of prior sell recommendations that the analyst makes for other firms that he follows. This effect is most prominent in periods of high market sentiment (e.g., the 1997-2001 period) and is stronger for glamour firms. This effect does not arise from sell recommendations being a proxy for low...

This paper reports results from a study on the adoption of an information visualization system by administrative data analysts. Despite the fact that the system was neither fully integrated with their current software tools nor with their existing data analysis practices, analysts identified a number of key benefits that visualization systems provide to their work. These benefits for the most p...

We extend research on fundamental accounting signals (signals) to a quarterly context and investigate the relative efficiency of analysts and whisperers in using signals in generating onequarter-ahead EPS forecasts. We find (1) a subset of signals found to be relevant in predicting one-year-ahead EPS changes are also relevant in predicting one-quarter-ahead EPS changes, (2) neither analysts nor...