The Value of Eliciting Information: Evidence from Sell-Side Analysts

The ability to elicit information is a critical skill that many analysts and other information agents strive to master. This paper develops and validates a novel approach to measure analysts' skill in eliciting information and studies its relation with analysts' performance. The results suggest that analysts who are skilled in eliciting information issue more accurate forecasts and more informative stock recommendations. Further, skilled analysts' recommendations are incrementally more informative for companies with more opaque information environments and with managers who may be delaying bad news. Finally, analysts skilled in eliciting information are more likely to be cited by journalists, recognized by the profession (Institutional Investor all-star status), and less likely to be demoted. These findings demonstrate the importance of elicitation as a distinct skill that influences analysts' output quality, thereby extending previous research that generally focuses on the performance effects of general analyst characteristics rather than specific skills.