Financial Disclosure and Customer Satisfaction: Do Companies Talking the Talk Actually Walk the Walk?

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• 作者：Ronald J. Balvers ; John F. Gaski ; Bill McDonald
• 关键词：American Customer Satisfaction Index ; Business ethics ; Customer satisfaction ; Financial disclosure ; Signaling ; 10 ; K ; Textual analysis
• 刊名：Journal of Business Ethics
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：November 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：139
• 期：1
• 页码：29-45
• 全文大小：766 KB
• 刊物类别：Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
• 刊物主题：Philosophy
  Ethics
  Economic Growth
  Management
  Quality of Life Research
  
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1573-0697
• 卷排序：139

文摘

Using the emerging technology of large-scale textual analysis, this study examines the use of the term ‘customer satisfaction’ and its variants in the annual reports issued by publicly traded U.S. corporations and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as Form 10-K. We document the frequency of the term’s occurrence in 10-Ks over the 1995–2013 period and the differences in usage across industries. We then relate the term’s usage in 10-Ks to subsequent scores from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to determine whether management’s discussion of customer satisfaction in financial disclosures is credible. The commitment of management to shareholders versus, more broadly, stakeholders is a central question in business ethics, and the integrity of management communication is a fundamental construct in the American Marketing Association’s Statement of Ethics. We document a complex relation between management’s discussion of customer satisfaction and subsequently reported satisfaction. We find that the general use of customer satisfaction (and similar terms) in 10-K documents is negatively correlated with subsequent ACSI scores. However, for retail firms, when the phrase is located near words indicating measurement or monitoring of the phenomenon, the empirical relation is reversed and becomes positive.