Temporal Perspectives: Resolving the Conflict between Current and Future Investors

Abstract

This article examines the temporal conflict between current and future investors. Although disclosure can reduce the information asymmetry between a firm and investors in the firm's securities, disclosure itself involves probabilities and difficult judgment choices and often is ambiguous. If a risk is possible though unlikely, should management disclose it? If the risk should be disclosed, how prominently should it be disclosed? These questions highlight the temporal conflict: disclosure of a possible risk harms a firm's current investors, and the more prominent the disclosure, the greater their harm; but failure to disclose the risk, or to give sufficient prominence to the disclosure, may harm the firm's future investors. The article's purpose is both positive and normative: to explain the conflict and its attendant problems, and to help resolve the conflict by analyzing, in each case, who should be included in the relevant audience.