关键词: 个人投资者异常关注, 分析师跟踪意愿, 盈余预测, 乐观偏差

Abstract: Individual investors are the main participants in China's capital market, which is an important feature different from traditional western capital markets. With the arrival of the digital era, especially with the rapid development of social financial media, the information searching on capital market has been rapidly changed, and the impact of individual investors has been increasing. Orient Fortune StockBar is China's largest open financial online social networking platform, where individual investors can instantly access firms' specific information. Whether the individual investors' attention on firms would influence analysts' earnings forecasting behaviors is an interesting question that remains unanswered.    This paper studies the impact of individual investors' abnormal attention on analysts' earnings forecasting behaviors by extracting the abnormal attention of individual investors from the browsing volume of stock bars through a model based on the characteristics of each firm. It is found that analysts prefer to follow firms with a high degree of abnormal attention from individual investors and make earnings forecasts with more optimistic bias. Further research shows that the interest association with institutional investors and firm managers is an important factor that causes analysts' optimism bias, but this phenomenon only exists in firms which have high information disclosure quality and have not received regulatory comments, which demonstrates that the reputation mechanism restrains analysts under certain conditions. The findings provide a new insight for understanding the influence of individual investors on analysts' decision-making in the emerging market.    This paper contributes to several streams of literature. Firstly, from the perspective of attention, it provides new evidence that retail investors will affect analysts' decision-making, thus enriching the consequence research concerning analysts' earnings forecast behavior. Secondly, it promotes the research on the role of individual investors' attention in the capital market. The previous literature mainly focused on the impact of individual investors' attention on listed companies, auditors and so on. This paper further finds that individual investors' abnormal attention will also affect analysts' behavioral decisions. Finally, this paper comprehensively analyzes analysts' willingness to follow and the optimistic bias, which is conducive to deepening the understanding of their behavior characteristics.

Key words: Individual Investors&apos, Abnormal Attention, Analysts&apos, Preference, Earnings Forecast, Optimistic Bias