Attentional Homogeneity in Industries: The Effect of Discretion

Industries differ in how homogeneous they are in terms of managerial cognitions. This study draws upon the concept of discretion, arguing that the more latitude managers have in an industry, the more varied their companies' attention patterns will be. Focusing on 14 industries assessed as differing widely in their discretion, we measured intra-industry attentional homogeneity using Computer Assisted Text Analysis of letters to shareholders in corporate annual reports. As expected, the greater the discretion in an industry, the less the attentional homogeneity.