ABSTRACT
We study innovation and product differentiation using a uniqueness measure based on textual analysis of prospectuses. We find that small and startup families have higher start rates than larger families, and their products are more unique. Unique strategies attract more inflows in the first three years, and investors respond more to textâbased uniqueness than other measures such as holdings or returns uniqueness. For established funds, word uniqueness has weak negative power for explaining returns, so investors in competitive equilibrium do not sacrifice much performance to get specialized products. Uniqueness attenuates the flowâperformance relation, reducing the risk of investor outflows.
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