Research on the Influence of Managers’ Self-Serving Attributive Behavior on Enterprise Investment Efficiency

Corporate investment behavior has always been a matter of great concern. It is the main force for corporate growth and basis for future cash flow growth. Investment will directly affect the profitability and operational risks of enterprises, and will also affect financing and dividend distribution and series of corporate financial policies. However, there is always a large number of un-der-investment or over-investment behavior in enterprises in reality, which is also called the non-efficiency investment by enterprises. In addition to macro factors, the behavior and psychological deviation of manager also has an impact on corporate investment behavior. From the perspective of behavioral finance, this paper draws on the phenomenon of psychological deviation of people’s overconfidence in psychology, and measures the overconfidence of managers in 2015-2017. The impact of behavior on corporate investment efficiency attempts to provide theoretical explanations and empirical evidence for the phenomenon of non-efficiency investment.


Introduction
tered. Therefore, decisions that managers believe to be reasonable may become invalid or even wrong decisions, which will cause serious losses to the enterprise.
In this paper, the research results of psychology are introduced into the research. According to the theory of psychological self-serving attribution, this paper expounds the relationship between self-serving behavior and managers' overconfidence, that is, the managers' overconfidence leads to self-serving attribution behavior, which is one of the manifestations of managers' overconfidence. At the same time, self-serving attribution behavior will help managers form the overconfident psychology.
Compared with other methods, the self-serving attribution measurement method is more reliable and effective both in terms of the selection basis of measurement variables and the error space of measurement variables. Through the establishment of the model and empirical analysis, this paper analyzes the impact of managers' self-serving attribution behavior on the investment efficiency of enterprises from the perspective of behavioral finance theory, which provides a new perspective for understanding the investment of enterprises and has theoretical significance for expanding the research depth and breadth.

Selections of Research Data
This paper selects the enterprises that publish the performance forecast for the

Measures of Self-Serving Attribution
Content analysis method originated from the field of news communication. Until the 1990s, almost all media contents have become content analysis objects. Schwenk (1990) [10] experimentally verified the effect of self-serving attribution on information users. Baginski (2004) [11] took 2085 management predictions from 1983 to 1986 as samples, and the results showed that the existence and type of attribution had a significant impact on enterprises. This paper introduces content analysis method to analyze the linguistic information about performance attribution in performance forecast.
The measure of self-serving attribution is a method to measure the overconfidence of managers according to self-serving attribution behavior judgment. It refers to the reading analysis of the reasons for the changes in the performance internal factors or external factors, and the self-serving attribution behavior tendency based on the influence of enterprise performance is positive or negative.
The judgment of self-serving attribution behavior is mainly based on the simple model proposed by Salancik and Meindl [12]. Sun Manli used this model for the first time in China to test the self-interest attribution theory. Later, Jiang Yapeng also used this classic model to judge the self-serving attribution behavior in research.
In this model, X represents the good development of the enterprise's operating results, and Y represents the bad development of the enterprise's operating results, A represents the internal influencing factors, and B represents the external influencing factors. According to this, AX indicates that the business operation has improved, which because of the correct judgment of the company itself, BX indicates that the business operation has improved, which because of factors other than the enterprise, AY indicates that the business operation has declined, and it is due to the wrong judgments of the enterprise itself, BY means that the business operation has declined, and it is due to factors other than the enterprise. Obviously, when AX − BX > 0, it means that the business operation has been improved, and the correct judgment of the enterprise itself has more influence than the factors outside the enterprise; when BY − AY > 0, the business operation has been decreased, and it is the factors outside the enterprise have more influence than the enterprise's own wrong judgment. In both cases, the reason for the overconfidence of corporate managers is the impact of self-serving attribution factors. When AX − BX < 0 or BY − AY < 0, the managers' overconfidence is not very obvious, and the influence of self-serving factors is small or non-existent. We can find the above data in the CSMAR database.
The performance forecast of enterprises can be divided into nine types, of which four are rising, four are falling, and one is uncertain. In the actual research process, the samples of companies with uncertain factors will be removed. The external cause includes macroeconomic conditions, changes in national macroeconomic policies, seasonal factors, litigation/legal actions, product market changes, industry competition issues, climate/disasters, changes in mandatory accounting policies, changes in industry sentiment, regulatory actions by the SFC, changes in the cost of raw materials, industry (business) characteristics, product price changes, etc.; Internal cause includes product structure changes, management measures/strategies/actions/plans, advertising/marketing strategies, purchasing/dispose of assets (shares), new product development/production, control (participation) changes in the performance of the company, asset impairment (return), production changes, operating conditions, project investment, asset restructuring, etc. We can express the variable of self-serving attribution as a dummy variable, with a value of 0 or 1. When AX − BX + BY − AY > 0, it indicates that the manager has self-serving attribution, and the value is 1; When AX − BX + BY − AY < 0, it indicates that the manager has no self-serving attribution, and the value is 0.

Measurement of Non-Efficiency Investment in Enterprises
The investment efficiency of enterprises can be understood as follows, that is, there is an optimal investment level, and when the actual investment expenditure of enterprises deviates from this optimal level, overinvestment or underinvestment are both investment inefficiencies. Richardson (2006) [13] first put forward the model to estimate the optimal investment level, as formula (1). The fitting of the model value is the optimal level of investment enterprises, and the residual represents the deviation of actual investment on the optimal investment level. The smaller of the absolute value of the residual means the higher of the investment efficiency of the enterprise. On the contrary, the larger the absolute value of the residual shows that the enterprise investment efficiency is lower.
Invest is the new investment expenditure of the enterprise, which is equal to the sum of cash paid by the current fixed assets, intangible assets and other long-term assets divided by the total assets at the beginning; Growth is the value of Tobin Q, which is generally used in international research to represent the growth opportunity of the company. There are still a large number of non-tradable shares in China's listed enterprises, and it is not possible to accurately calculate the value of non-tradable shares by common methods, so use it to measure growth opportunities for listed companies may be biased. Cash is Cash holdings, which is equal to the sum of total cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period divided by the total assets at the end of the period; Lev is the asset-liability ratio of an enterprise and represents the capital structure of the company; Size is the size of the enterprise, which is the natural logarithm of assets; Duration refers to the listed age of the enterprise and represents the development stage of the company; Ret is stock return, which is the annual return of the stock considering the cash dividend reinvestments. Industry is the dummy variable of the Industry; Year is the dummy variable of the Year; "Overinvest" refers to overinvestment, which is equal to the residual greater than zero after the regression estimation of the expression. "Underinvest" means insufficient investment, which is equal to the absolute value of the residual less than zero after regression estimation of the expression value.

Research Hypothesis and Models
Psychological research shows that self-serving attribution is a typical and universal psychological bias. Humans have a tendency to make self-serving attributions, and business managers, most of whom are already successful, are apparently more overconfident. They overestimate their management ability and are willing to undertake high-risk projects. But in reality, the interests of managers to control the enterprise's inefficient investment behavior. In order to build their own empire and control more enterprise resources, self-serving managers gain more private interests by investing in projects. Managers will be more willing to invest in projects that do not increase but decrease the enterprise value. Based on the above analysis, we assume that: Hypothesis 1: Managers' self-serving attribution behavior is positively related to the degree of non-efficiency investment.
In this paper, model 2 was constructed to test hypothesis 1: it is expected in this paper that when the sample is the listed enterprises with excessive investment, the coefficient of Overinvest is significantly positive, that is, managers' self-serving attribution aggravates the enterprise's over-investment t, thus reducing the investment efficiency. When the sample is the listed enterprises with under-investment, the coefficient of Overinvest is significantly negative, that is, the managers' self-serving attribution behavior corrects the lack of investment, thus improving the investment efficiency. Based on this, this paper proposes the following research hypotheses: In this paper, model 3 is constructed to test hypothesis 2: the cash flow of an enterprise is the main source of funds for its investment activities, so the cash flow has an impact on its investment.
The interaction term between self-serving attribution and cash flow indicates the impact of manager self-serving attribution on cash flow. In the investment equation of Malmendier and Tate [16], the main explanatory variable is the interaction term between overconfidence of managers and cash flow.
Behavioral finance theory points out that managers have great differences in the degree of overconfidence due to their differences in gender, age, educational background and cultural background, so the investment behavior of enterprises will also have great differences (Preston et al., 2006) [17].
Although both men and women show overconfidence, men are generally more overconfident than women (Lundeberg et al., 1994) [18]. The systematic differences in the degree of confidence between men and women are most prominent in enterprise financial decisions (Beyer and Bowden, 1977) [19].
Many studies have shown that women are more risk-averse than men when investing. The evidence from Jianakoplos and Bernasek (1998) [20] suggests that female investors tend to adopt more cautious investment methods. Graham et al.
(2002) [21] further explored the reasons for the differences in investment strategies between women and men. Men are highly selective about information, and often ignore details and information that they consider to be unimportant. Based on the above analysis, this paper proposes the following research hypotheses: Hypothesis 3: male managers with self-serving attribution behavior are more likely to cause non-investment efficiency than female managers.
In this paper, model 4 was constructed to test hypothesis 3: the gender of managers was selected as the variable of managers' traits to test the influence on the relationship between managers' self-serving attribution and the investment efficiency of enterprises.
The measurement methods of relevant variables are shown in Table 1.

1) Descriptive statistics of variables
In

2) Single factor test
It can be seen in Table 3 that in each year, the t-test of inter-group differences passed the significance level test of at least 5%, indicating that there were significant differences in investment levels between the self-serving attribution sample group and the non-self-serving attribution sample group.

3) Regression analysis of inefficient investment
The regression results are shown in Table 4.

1) Descriptive statistical analysis
The residual obtained by Model 1 is the non-efficiency investment. The residual difference is greater than 0 and less than 0. If it is greater than 0, it is over-investment. If it is less than 0, it is under-investment. And the residual value Table 3. Self-serving attribution of investment level difference test.  2) Regression analysis Table 6 reports the regression results of the influence of self-serving attribution on non-efficiency investment of managers in the overinvestment and underinvestment groups. From the overall regression, the fitting degree of the model is   Table 6. Regression analysis of self-serving attribution and non-efficiency investment.  Table 7 reports the regression results of the model 3 in the overinvestment and Table 7. Regression analysis of interaction terms.

Conclusions
In order to explore the relationship between self-serving attribution of manager and enterprises' non-efficiency investment, this paper first summarizes and Through empirical research, this paper comes to the following conclusions: 1) In the overinvestment group, the regression coefficient of managers' self-serving attribution was 0.1017, which was positive at the significance level of 1%, indi- 2) For managers with self-serving attribution, the higher the free cash flow is, the more likely it is to lead to overinvestment, while the lower the free cash flow is, the more obvious the inhibitory effect on underinvestment is.
3) It shows that compared with women, in enterprises with male executives, managers' self-serving attribution has a stronger promoting effect on enterprises' excessive investment behavior.

Suggestions
First, establish a set of mechanisms to constrain managers, and maximize the supervision of the adverse effects of self-serving managers' investment on enterprise investment. We can develop the characteristic index system of managers, effectively identify and measure the degree of confidence of managers, analyze the impact of self-serving attribution of managers on enterprise investment, financing and other behaviors, and timely restrict the decision-making activities of managers.
Second, improve accounting information disclosure standards. Although the annual report standard has been developed and implemented for more than 20 years, the contradiction between supply and demand based on information disclosure is still very prominent. Most listed companies are more inclined to attribute good performance to the internal conditions of the company, while bad performance is attributed to the external environment of the company, which provides the room for the company managers to make self-interested attribution. In this regard, the guidelines should clearly require that regardless of the performance, listed companies should fully analyze the opportunities and challenges of the external environment, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of internal management, while providing relevant evidence of market environmental impact; on the other hand, the Annual Report Guidelines clearly require "listing the changes and reasons for the company's operating income, costs, expenses, R&D investment, cash flow and other items", but there are still a large number of such things as "the decline in net profit is due to the decline in total profit". Manages' self-serving attribution as a psychological behavior tendency, cannot be well measured and disclosed. Listed companies should voluntarily disclose information about the company's development stage or future prospects, and actively improve the quality of information disclosure and the robustness of accounting, which can also properly form self-restraint on the self-serving attribution of the managers.
Third, improve the external supervision of certified public accountants. For managers who attribute self-serving, auditing can well restrain the behavior of Open Journal of Social Sciences management to despise conservatism and provide reasonable guarantee for financial report. Therefore, making full use of appropriate external supervision will appropriately constrain managers' self-serving attribution, and improve accounting conservatism. At the same time, in order to obtain more sales volume and click-through rate, the media will pay special attention to and report on the hot topic, and play the supervisory function of public opinion. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the external supervision of the performance attribution information of listed companies by news media, the public and market intermediaries, and increase the difficulty of the manipulation of performance attribution information, reducing the space for manipulation, and improving the transparency of information disclosure.