Disclosure, Competition, and Learning from Asset Prices

Nov 21, 2017

Working Paper No. 00018-00

competition

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This paper studies the classic information-sharing problem in a duopoly setting in which firms learn information from a financial market. By disclosing information, a firm incurs a proprietary cost of losing competitive advantage to its rival firm but benefits from learning from a more informative asset market. Firms' disclosure decisions can exhibit strategic complementarity, which is strong enough to support both a disclosure equilibrium and a nondisclosure equilibrium. Allowing minimal learning from asset prices dramatically changes firms' disclosure behaviors: without learning from prices, firms do not disclose at all; but with minimal learning from prices, firms can almost fully disclose their information. Learning from asset prices benefits firms, consumers, and liquidity traders, but harms financial speculators.

Liyan Yang

Liyan Yang

Rotman School, University of Toronto