Publicly-traded companies are required to regularly file financial
statements and disclosures. Analysts, investors, and regulators
leverage these filings to support decision making, with high financial and legal stakes. Despite their ubiquity in finance, little is
known about the information seeking behavior of users accessing
such filings. In this work, we present the first study of this behavior.
We analyze 14 years of logs of users accessing company filings
of more than 600K distinct companies on the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis,
and Retrieval (EDGAR) system, the primary resource for accessing
company filings. We provide an analysis of the information-seeking
behavior for this high-impact domain. We find that little behavioral history is available for the majority of users, while frequent
users have rich histories. Most sessions focus on filings belonging
to a small number of companies, and individual users are interested in a limited number of companies. Out of all sessions, 66%
contain filings from one or two companies and 50% of frequent
users are interested in six companies or less. Understanding user
interactions with EDGAR can suggest ways to enhance the user
journey in browsing filings, e.g., via filing recommendation. Our
work provides a stepping stone for the academic community to
tackle retrieval and recommendation tasks for the finance domain.