The Informational Role of Imagery in Financial Decision-Making : A New Approach

We develop a novel approach to identify characteristics of images that are likely to, and found to, affect investment decisions. We also create new methodologies to quantify these characteristics. We hypothesize and find that our newly developed machine learning-based measure of informativeness—the degree to which the images convey information beyond the content embedded in textual narratives, which we refer to as additivity—has a significant incremental effect on funding beyond other image characteristics. Our exploration of the impact on financing decisions goes beyond existing imagery explorations within this developing research field