In an environment where capital market participants collectively possess superior information about a decision faced by a firm manager, we use an experimental market to analyze the effectiveness with which the market communicates this information to the manager through stock price. We do so in a...

This study conducts the first analysis of the influence of private communication on earnings management. Results show that private communication can curb earnings management; the constraining effect of private communication on earnings management is greater when the number of external...

We show that firms may benefit from allowing some earnings management, because it can make noisy signals more informative. We model a firm that cannot observe a manager's cost of effort, her effort choice, and whether she manipulated a publicly observable signal. An optimal contract links...

We consider a cheap talk game with a sender who has a reputational concern for an ability to predict a state of the world correctly, and where receivers may misunderstand the message sent. When communication between the sender and each receiver is private, we identify an equilibrium in which the...

This paper reports on experiments testing the viability of markets for cheap talk information. We find that the poor quality of the information transmitted leads to a collapse of information markets. The reasons for this are surprising given the previous experimental results on cheap-talk games....