We investigate how the effects of jargon on investors’ investment willingness are moderated by industry knowledge and jargon type. In an experiment with PMBA students, we find that including more jargon in management disclosures reduces investment willingness for investors without industry knowledge, but increases investment willingness for investors with low industry knowledge; these effects exist regardless of whether good or bad jargon is used. However, with respect to investors with high industry knowledge, they do differentiate good jargon from bad jargon, and their investment willingness is reduced only when bad jargon is present but not when good jargon is present. We also conduct another experiment to investigate the moderating role of syntactic complexity on jargon impact. Our results suggest that while the effect of jargon on investors with low industry knowledge varies with syntactic complexity, its impact on investors with high industry knowledge prevails irrespective of syntactic complexity.