Should principals explain and justify their evaluations? Suppose the principal's evaluation is private information, but she can provide justification by sending a costly cheap-talk message. If she does not provide justification, her message space is restricted, but the message is costless. I...

Unfavorable news are often delivered under the disguise of vagueness. But are people sufficiently naive to be fooled by such positive spin? We use a theoretical model and a laboratory experiment to study the strategic use of vagueness in a voluntary disclosure game. Consider a sender who aims at...

Encouraging inventors to disclose new inventions is an important economic justification for the patent system, yet the technical information contained in patent applications is often inadequate and unclear. This paper proposes a novel approach to measure disclosure in patent applications using...

Firms constantly face new and more stringent tax disclosure requirements and, increasingly, paying a fair share of tax is seen as part of corporate social responsibility. In this paper, we investigate whether mandating qualitative tax disclosure leads to intended outcomes, using, as an exogenous...

We identify features of interactions on online platforms that make an ad-funded business model attractive for the platform, but also for consumers. We then show that ad-funded platforms heavily rely on data for their ability to create value for their users. Formally, we show that data...

We investigate the causal impact of public discourse on socially responsible market behavior. We conduct laboratory market experiments with products that differ in their production costs and social impact, and provide market actors and impacted third parties with the opportunity to discuss...

The OECD seeks to align transfer pricing and profit taxation with value creation but fails to provide a clear definition. This paper argues that value creation requires international cooperation and that the profit tax base should therefore be allocated according to standards commonly considered...

The purpose of this article is to analyze how competitive forces may influence the way media firms like TV channels raise revenue. A media firm can either be financed by advertising revenue, by direct payment from the viewers (or the readers, if we consider newspapers), or by both. We show that...