Fair Disclosure and Investor Asymmetric Awareness in Stock Markets

The notion of awareness is introduced to study Regulation Fair Disclosure, a rule implemented by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission in 2000. The regulator aims to reduce information asymmetry among investors, and expects public forums to subsume the forbidden information channel of selective forums. We show that even with cooperative managers and effective technology, this is only possible under the assumption of symmetric awareness. If a professional investor is aware of more uncertainties than others are, lacking the incentive to share the insights, he would not raise critical questions and acquire relevant information at public forums. This leads to inefficient information production. We also analyze the market prices and investors' welfare under different disclosure forms and awareness assumptions. At last, we discuss the implications of asymmetric awareness on the overall benefit and cost, the empirical findings, and the policies of the regulation