Investors’ Perceptions of Sustainability Reporting—A Review of the Experimental Literature

Abstract

Prior research has shown that companies’ sustainability reporting in relation to environmental, social, and governance disclosures influences investors’ investment decisions. Since the credibility of these disclosures is often questionable, it is important to understand how investors perceive sustainability reporting and include it in their decision-making process. Although the high relevance of this topic has already been clarified in research, the extant literature is heterogeneous and poorly connected on several levels. Against this background, we conducted a systematic literature review of 27 experimental studies on this topic published in leading accounting journals between 2000 and 2021. By clustering the results according to Mercer’s credibility factors, we synthesize the research on investors’ perceptions of sustainability reporting in a novel way, and derive suggestions for future research. We find that the interest in experimental research on sustainability reporting perception has grown in recent years. Researchers so far have examined sustainability performance and external assurance as the most relevant factors determining the credibility of sustainability information. Other factors, such as disclosure precision and inherent plausibility, are sparsely explored. We provide avenues for future research to investigate the perception of sustainability disclosures more comprehensively, by focusing on understudied credibility factors and on new theories and heuristics. Additionally, we suggest considering diverse experimental settings, such as different investor groups, company characteristics, or experimental procedures in general.