The Importance of Selected Aspects of a Company’s Reputation for Individual Stock Market Investors—Evidence from Polish Capital Market

Abstract

In recent decades, the company’s reputation has become an important signal and a decision-making stimulus for one of the key stakeholder groups—investors. Reputation includes both cognitive and affective aspects that investors may be more or less guided by. The article examines the importance of selected aspects of reputation for individual stock market investors on the capital market in Poland. The research used the method of an internet survey addressed to 417 individual investors, and the survey results allowed the answering of five research questions. The research results showed that from the point of view of individual investors operating on the Polish capital market, the informational aspects of companies’ reputations are slightly more important than the financial and growth aspects, and the least important are the social aspects, although a considerable internal differentiation of the significance of individual sub-criteria was noted. This study is the first to examine the importance of various aspects of reputation among Polish individual investors and one of the few such studies on an international scale.