This study examines how firms' voluntary disclosure decisions are influenced by product market competition. Using separate measures to capture different dimensions of competition, I show that competition from potential entrants increases disclosure quantity while competition from existing rivals decreases disclosure quantity. I also find that competition enhances disclosure quality mainly through reducing the optimism in profit forecasts and reducing the pessimism in investment forecasts. Moreover, I find that the above association is less pronounced for industry leaders, consistent with industry leaders facing less competitive pressures than industry followers.
This study examines how product market competition affects firms' mandatory disclosure strategies. Using the information in the SEC comment letters, I observe that firms in a highly competitive market are more likely to file unaudited mandatory disclosures with deficiency. I also find that firms facing higher competition from potential entrants tend to bundle positive (negative) mandatory items with the negative (positive) management earnings forecasts. These findings support my conjecture that firms exercise discretion in the mandatory disclosure through less transparent ways, due to a proprietary cost resulting from market competition. Additional analyses demonstrate a positive economic consequence of such disclosure strategy, and the relationship between market competition and mandatory disclosure strategies is stronger for industry followers than for industry leaders.
This study examines the relationship between information disclosures and firm value under different levels of product market competition. Using a unique information rating scheme that draws from 114 measures over five dimensions of information disclosure from 2005 to 2013, we find that firms with higher levels of information disclosure (better information transparency) are related to higher industry-adjusted Tobin's Q. We also find that the levels of information disclosure and product market competition interact in affecting firm value. This relationship is robust after controlling for a number of firm-specific factors and agency-based measures. Our paper brings two streams of research that aim to explain the variation in firms' value together, and suggests that information disclosure and product market competition complement each other in enhancing a firm's value.
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This book provides a critical analysis of the evolution of corporate disclosure. Building upon prior academic literature, it assesses the most important changes in mandatory corporate disclosure, the growing relevance of social and environmental disclosure, and revolutionary new forms of corporate communication, in particular social media. It also includes empirical analyses that shed further light on the impact of voluntary communication, i.e. social and environmental reporting and corporate social media communication, on managerial and investment decisions. Lastly, it discusses new directions for accounting and corporate governance research on the theoretical and empirical challenges of corporate disclosure. Offering a wealth of relevant and timely advice, the book will help regulators design policies that allow businesses to overcome current and emerging economic, social, and technological challenges.
We study firms' voluntary disclosure in an oligopoly market for vertically differentiated products, where firms are allowed to advertise a rival's product as well as their own products. When consumers are uncertain of product qualities, Board (2009)1) and Hotz and Xiao (2011)2) show that price competition among firms alleviates firms' incentives to disclose the quality of their own product. Nonetheless, firms still have incentives to distinguish their own products from those of the competitors to attract more consumers. A comparative advertisement is a useful way to distinguish products and thus, a rival's advertisement can lead to a disclosure of a firm's product information. Comparative or negative advertisements are used in many industries and political campaigns. In 2010, for example in the United States, Verizon Wireless compared their service coverage with that of the competitor, AT&T, on the TV commercial and their Web site in order to advertise the 3G network service for mobile phones (See Figure 1). They had a broader service area than AT&T did and used a comparative advertisement to show that their service was superior.3) Through the negative advertisement by Verizon Wireless on the AT&T's service, the information on the AT&T's mobile phone service was revealed even though AT&T did not disclose their nation-wide service coverage in a picture. This is in contrast with the fact that AT&T themselves put the map showing their nation-wide 3G service coverage for iPads on their Web site.4) At that time AT&T was the only service provider for iPads. This paper allows firms to advertise a rival's product. We show that the qualities of all the products in an industry are fully revealed by a high quality firm's comparative advertisement and full revelation is the unique equilibrium outcome. Each firm's advertisement (message) can convey information on either its own product quality or a rival's or both. Differentiating from traditional models that consider advertisement as a signal of product qualities (Nelson, 19745); Schmalensee, 19786); Grossman and Shapiro, 19847); Kihlstrom and Riordan, 19848)), we consider it as a truthful claim about its qualities. In other words, we see the role of advertisement as conveying factual information directly to the consumers. The restriction of firms' messages to truthful claims can be justified by the argument that an untruthful claim, such as an overstatement on their own product or an understatement on their rival's product, could be challenged in a court of law. If the claim was found to be untruthful, the firm that sent the untrue message might have to pay a fine or more, and the true quality would be revealed as the result. In this model, full revelation occurs as the unique equilibrium outcome. If firms do not disclose any information and consumers do not distinguish the qualities among products, then the firms' profits are zero by price competition. By revealing some information and having consumers perceive that the product is differentiated from its rivals', a firm can increase the profit. In the competition between two firms, there exists an equilibrium in which full information on all products is revealed by the firm with a higher quality (henceforth, called a high quality firm) as in the above example of the mobile phone service industry. The high quality firm can increase the profit by advertising the rival's low quality product as negatively as possible because such an advertisement increases its demand by making more consumers switch from the low quality product to the high quality product. Since false claims are not allowed, the negative advertisements reveal the true quality of the rival's product. Meanwhile, the high quality firm reveals the true quality of its own product building grounds for a higher price. Since an advertisement that fully reveals both firms' product qualities is a dominant strategy for the high quality firm, full revelation is the unique outcome. In general, full revelation fails without advertisement on a rival's product. Such revelation, as many studies suggest, increases consumers' welfare, and thus the literature argues in favor of the introduction of mandatory disclosure laws (Fishman and Hagerty, 20039); Board, 2009; Hotz and Xiao, 2011). However, mandatory disclosure laws burden both private and public sectors with an enforcement cost and a deadweight loss. As an alternative to the costly legal solution, the results of this paper suggest that a market can lead to a full revelation with voluntary disclosure if negative advertisement on rivals' products is allowed. As a parallel example, in the domain of politics, negative advertisement exists in the form of negative campaigning. Amid ongoing debate and controversy, recent studies such as Polborn and Yi (2006)10) defend prevailing negative campaigning arguing that consequently revealed information on the candidates empowers the electorate to make more-informed decisions. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. After reviewing the related literature in Section 2, we present an oligopoly model with price competition between two firms in Section 3 and derive the firms' profit functions from the equilibrium pricing rules and the associated demand functions in Section 4. With the profit functions, in Section 5, we analyze the firms' advertisement strategies and show that there exists an equilibrium in which full information is revealed by the high quality firm. Section 6 concludes the findings and discusses extendible issues.
We examine whether a firm's voluntary disclosures, proxied by management earnings forecasts, affect its innovation activity. A firm making more disclosures generates fewer patents and lower-quantity patents. Enactment of SOX is applied as a natural experiment for an exogenous shock to voluntary disclosure. Corporate innovation is reduced for accelerated filers, especially after SOX becomes effective. Nondedicated institutional ownership, R&D spillover, and rival firms' innovation are higher for accelerated filers after SOX. There is more of a negative effect of voluntary disclosure on innovation activity when product markets are highly competitive, industry information diffusion is speedy, and disclosures are more informative.
