Reliability-Relevance Trade-Offs and the Efficiency of Aggregation

This paper studies how an accountant's method of aggregating information in a financial report is affected by differences in the reliability and relevance of components of the report. We study a firm that hires an accountant to produce a report that reveals information to investors regarding the returns to the firm's past investments. In constructing the report, the accountant must combine information elicited from the firm's manager with other information directly observable to the accountant. The manager's information is assumed to be directly observable only by the manager and to be of superior quality to the other information available to the accountant. Reliability‐relevance trade‐offs arise because as the accountant places more weight on the manager's report, potentially more useful information gets included in the report, at the cost of encouraging the manager to distort his or her information to a greater extent. Capital market participants anticipate this behavior and price the firm accordingly. We show how the market's price response to the release of the firm's aggregate report, the efficiency of the firm's investment decisions, and the manager's incentives to manipulate the soft information under his or her control are all affected by—and affect—the aggregation procedure the accountant adopts. In addition, we identify a broad range of circumstances under which aggregated reports are strictly more efficient than disaggregated reports because aggregation tempers the manager's misreporting incentives. We also demonstrate that, as any given component of the aggregated accounting report becomes softer, the equilibrium level of the firm's investment diminishes and the market places greater weight on the remaining components of the report.     

Legal Penalties and Audit Quality: An Experimental Investigation*

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of legal penalties on audit quality under different legal regimes. We investigate whether audit quality is affected differentially due to the complexity inherent in legal regimes and the frequency of imposing legal penalties. Economic theory predicts that players adopt equilibrium strategies that reflect the expectation that a penalty will be incurred, but the actual occurrences of penalties, if consistent with this expectation, should not prompt an individual to modify his or her strategy. However, learning theory suggests that players' choices will be repeated in the future based on outcomes. We found that penalties triggered both increases and decreases in effort, and seemed to introduce a “shock” that increased the variability of effort. We also observed a “funnel” effect — that is. greater changes in effort closer to the imposition of penalties, and smaller changes as more periods go by without a penalty.     

Altering Perceptions Through Repositioning: An Exercise in Framing

This research was conducted to examine the efficacy of repositioning public parks and recreation services in the public mind. Respondents were recruited at various venues throughout a large Canadian city and randomly assigned to one of five groups. After reading hypothetical newspaper format articles, respondents completed questionnaires investigating their beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral intentions regarding a local recreation agency's efforts to reduce youth crime. Four treatment messages contained various combinations of real, psychological, and competitive repositioning messages, while a control group received no information. All types of repositioning messages were effective in improving beliefs and behavioral intentions, but not attitudes. There was no significant evidence that numerical treatment messages were more effective than non-numerical messages or that the cumulative effects of various repositioning messages were more effective than a single type of message. Discussion focuses on efficacy of various framing messages, on suggestions for future research related to repositioning, and on considerations related to social marketing efforts of this nature.     

Family‐Controlled Firms and Informed Trading: Evidence from Short Sales

We investigate the relation between organization structure and the information content of short sales, focusing on founder‐ and heir‐controlled firms. Our analysis indicates that family‐controlled firms experience substantially higher abnormal short sales prior to negative earnings shocks than nonfamily firms. Supplementary testing indicates that family control characteristics intensify informed short selling. Further analysis suggests that daily short‐sale interest in family firms contains useful information in forecasting stock returns; however, we find no discernable effect for nonfamily firms. This analysis provides compelling evidence that informed trading via short sales occurs more readily in family firms than in nonfamily firms.     

The Impact of Preferred-for-Common Exchange Offers on Firm Value

This paper examines the impact of capital structure changes which have no corporate tax consequences. Specifically, exchange offers involving preferred and common stock are analyzed. We find that systematic changes in firm value occur when companies announce preferred-for-common exchange offers. Consequently, we interpret our results to be consistent with a signalling hypothesis. We also find weaker evidence suggesting the existence of agency cost effects or wealth redistributions across security classes. Our findings imply that capital structure changes need not alter the tax status of the issuing firm to affect firm value.     

Interdependence between the information evaluator and the decision maker*

Abstract. A game theoretic model of the relationship between an information evaluator and a decision maker is formulated, and interdependence analysis is employed to decompose the game into several components. Each of these components represents one aspect of the interdependence relationship experienced by the information evaluator and decision maker. The analysis is then employed to distinguish among game forms. Résumé. Un modèle de la théorie des jeux établissant une relation entre un évaluateur d'informations et un décideur est proposé, et l'analyse d'interdépendance est utilisée afin de décomposer le jeu en plusieurs parties. Chacune de ces composantes représente une facette de la relation d'interdépendance vécue par l‘évaluateur d'informations et le décideur. Par la suite, l'analyse sert à établir une distinction parmi les “formes de jeu”.