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...

The authors review recent literature on the role of corporate financial reporting and transparency in reducing governance-related agency conflicts between managers, directors, shareholders, and other stakeholders—most notably financial regulators—and suggest some avenues for future research....

How does the prospect of sale affect the seller's incentive to investigate — to acquire socially valuable information about the asset? How do the disclosure rules of contract law influence the investigation decision? Shavell (1994) showed that, if sellers and buyers are symmetrically informed,...

Consider managers evaluating their employees' performances. Should managers justify their subjective evaluations? Suppose a manager's evaluation is private information. Justifying her evaluation is costly but limits the principal's scope for distorting her evaluation of the employee. I show that...

This paper analyzes the role of disclosure enforcement mechanisms (such as SEC enforcement teams and corporate governance systems) in directing the disclosure practices of managers when the information is used by shareholders to monitor the manager. The paper establishes a role for a disclosure...

For many goods and services, such as cellular-phone service and debit-card transactions, the price of the next unit of service depends on past usage. As a result, consumers who are inattentive to their past usage but are aware of contract terms may remain uncertain about the price of the next...

Relative performance evaluation (RPE) is, at least on paper, enjoying widespread popularity in determining the level of executive compensation. Yet existing empirical evidence of RPE is decidedly mixed. Two principal explanations are held responsible for this discord. A constructional challenge...

Relative performance evaluation (RPE) is, at least on paper, enjoying widespread popularity in determining the level of executive compensation. Yet existing empirical evidence of RPE is decidedly mixed. Two principal explanations are held responsible for this discord. A constructional challenge...

This study investigates how the disclosure of management compensation contracts affects executive behavior by modeling a situation in which both the principal-agent relationship and market interactions are important. We find that making the disclosure of these contracts mandatory creates...

In insurance industry, product disclosure statements (PDSs) consist of descriptions of uncertain contingencies by the insurance plans (e.g., “hospital coverage”, “dental coverage”, etc.) and are often very different. In this paper, we model PDSs as information partitions of the state...