Investigation of the influence of financial reports language structure on willingness to invest

This study investigates the effects of linguistic factors on willingness to invest. One of the most important linguistic factors is the financial reports language structure, dividing into two groups: concrete language and abstract language. Since the influence of the financial reports language structure on willingness to invest is almost affected by psychological factors (especially psychological distance), this study deals with the effect of the language structure and psychological distance on willingness to invest. For this test, the research framework of Elliott et.al (2015) is developed and an experiment with a 2×4 between subject design (including four scenarios that provide information from fully abstract to fully concrete and two scenarios with short and long psychological distance) is utilized. According to results, generally the language structure does not merely effect on willingness to invest. Also, increasing the psychological distance does not change the effect of language structure on willingness to invest. The analysis of the findings shows that language structure influence on willingness to invest, when the concreteness of information augment through methods of content (presenting more information) more than methods of form (flowing text).