Selective and Aggregate Disclosure

27 Pages Posted: 28 Nov 2006 Last revised: 22 Feb 2008

See all articles by Dhananjay Nanda

Dhananjay Nanda

University of Miami - Department of Accounting

Yun Zhang

George Washington University

Date Written: January 2008

Abstract

We study the disclosure strategy of a firm's manager who may privately observe two signals that are informative about the firm's prospects. The two signals correspond to the firm's two business segments and are observationally correlated, i.e. the observation of one affects the likelihood of observing the other. If the manager makes a separate disclosure of each signal, we show that, there exists a selective disclosure equilibrium where the manager is falsely modest; i.e. he suppresses favorable information even if it is his only information. We then demonstrate that this equilibrium may result in lower welfare than an aggregate disclosure regime, where the manager is restricted to disclosing the aggregate of the two signals, even though it garbles information.

Keywords: Disclosure, Accounting aggregation, False modesty

JEL Classification: M41, M45, D82

Suggested Citation

Nanda, Dhananjay and Zhang, Yun, Selective and Aggregate Disclosure (January 2008). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=947575 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.947575

Dhananjay Nanda (Contact Author)

University of Miami - Department of Accounting ( email )

Coral Gables, FL 33146-6531
United States

Yun Zhang

George Washington University ( email )

2121 I Street NW
Washington, DC 20052
United States

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