Psychological studies suggest that jargon could increase credibility judgment as it suggests a higher level of management competence and a higher level of exerted effort ( Thompson and Ince, 2013 ). With respect to investors with no industry knowledge, it is possible that they believe management is the expert and thus rely on the use of jargon to infer management credibility. It is also possible that these investors do not make different credibility assessments based on jargon because they do not perceive that they have the knowledge to assess credibility. With respect to investors with some-but-low industry knowledge, as discussed in our theory section, they are more likely to rely on heuristic cues to make judgments. More particularly to an IPO setting, since management is motivated to reduce information asymmetry in order to reduce IPOunderpricing, investors may infer that management’s use of jargon is inconsistent with their incentives at IPO and conclude that management is correspondingly more credible ( Koonce et al., 2018 ). Thus, investors with some-but-low knowledge will perceive managers to be more credible with more jargon used in the IPO prospectus. However, such an effect of jargon on credibility is less likely for investors with high industry knowledge, given that they have the requisite knowledge to complete a task and are less likely to rely on simple cues to infer credibility ( Ericsson and Lehmann, 1996; Ericsson and Smith, 1991; Frederick and Libby, 1986; Libby and Luft, 1993 ).