Are you comparing apples and oranges when making investing decisions?

Comparing meaningful data is important when investing, but what if the data is unintentionally skewed?

A Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Ph.D. student studied how comparable metrics create a false sense of investing confidence and can ultimately cost the bottom line. She presented the findings at the Behavioral Decision Research in Management (BDRM) conference at Cornell Tech on June 15, 2026.

Lauren Frederick found that a false sense of comprehension may impact investing prowess of non-professional investors, also known as retail investors.

Armed with an investing app of their choice and seemingly comparable environmental, social and governance (ESG) data, investors may think they’re supporting companies they’re morally aligned with. However, a consequence of aggregated data is often a lack of specificity.

“We’re the first study to look at the effect of comparability on your perceived ability or how it affects confidence,” she said. “…nobody’s really thinking about it, especially retail investors.”

The sixth year Ph.D. candidate studied how comparable ESG data, such as employee well-being or carbon emissions, makes information processing easier. Despite this, the cognitive shortcut doesn’t result in better decisions.

“… people just confuse this easier ability to consume information as knowledge,” Frederick said.

In the research, which is still in development, Frederick and her co-authors, Kristina Rennekamp, Brian White and Xinyu Zhang, all SC Johnson College professors, analyzed how comparable ESG-metrics impacted investors’ confidence in their abilities.

“The punchline is that the presence of a comparable ESG metric, no matter how useful the metric actually is, leads investors that are wanting to make ESG-related investments to feel more strongly about self-investment and less strongly about seeking external advice or delegating the decision to a financial advisor,” Frederick said.

The group’s work lands squarely within the experimental accounting research space, using experimental methods to answer different accounting research questions. Similar to psychology or other disciplines, they might use a lab experiment to test how psychological or economic theories affect human behavior.

Socializing their findings

The accounting and psychology crossover led them to the fortieth biennial Behavioral Decision Research in Management (BDRM) conference. The multi-discipline, multi-day event brings together hundreds of faculty and Ph.D. students from business schools around the world to discuss behavioral science research in accounting, finance, operations, marketing, economics and management.

“The paper is something that we are continuously revising,” said Frederick, “and attending the conference is an opportunity to get feedback on it from the broader academic community.”

As noted in a Cornell Chronicle article from June 1986 marking the first BDRM conference, studying human behavior and psychology alongside quantitative topics in business schools helps students approach practical business problems with a more people-oriented perspective. Today, across the SC Johnson College, students like Frederick incorporate these behavioral principles into standard business topics.

“This was my first time not at an accounting-specific conference and that was kind of nerve wracking to me,” said Frederick. “There was another professor who was presenting in the same session as me and he had written another paper that I cite in my dissertation. So, it was very cool and I never would have interacted with him otherwise because he’s not an accounting person.”

The non-accounting approach of the BDRM conference allowed Frederick to rub elbows with researchers in other disciplines where experimental research and behavioral theories are the norm.

“It was inspiring to be able to take some of the way that they approach research and bring it back to the accounting world and think about the future of experimental accounting research,” she said.

To compare or not compare?

What does this mean for the retail investor, those non-professionals with their investment apps at the ready?

“If I’m a retail investor and I’m trying to make an investment based on some non-financial or ESG-related information, I should not just look at the comparable metric,” Frederick said. “I should continue to read the full disclosure and try to understand how these companies are performing individually before I compare them to one another.”

Looking beyond the comparable metric into the full financial information isn’t always accessible to retail investors, an issue that Frederick thinks needs to be addressed.

“I think financial education, especially investment education, needs to become more important to schools or to the government. To everyone, really,” she said.

Frederick advises retail investors to resist gut reactions.

“Be informed before you make your decision. Seek advice when you can, do your own research when you can, and take a second to think critically rather than just relying on your initial reaction, which is probably good advice for life, I suppose.”