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

摘要： 本文利用财经社交媒体的数据,构建个人投资者异常关注度指标,研究个人投资者关注对分析师盈余预测行为的影响。结果表明,对于个人投资者关注异常高的公司,分析师跟踪研究的意愿越大,盈余预测的乐观偏差也越大。进一步研究表明,与机构投资者和公司管理层的利益关联是造成分析师乐观偏差的重要因素,但这一现象只存在于信息披露质量高、未收到监管问询函的公司中,这说明声誉机制对分析师起到了约束作用。本文研究为我国资本市场上个人投资者对分析师行为决策的影响提供了新的增量证据。

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