Relevance of earnings for explaining equity prices is investigated by many value relevance studies. This study investigates whether fiscal year end earnings as a proxy for next period's earnings have additional information, beyond the information incorporated in contemporaneous equity price, for...

This study examines the relevance of modified audit opinions (MAO) in private debt contracting. We use the auditor's explanatory language to partition MAOs into Inconsistency opinions, resulting from an accounting change or a restatement; and Inadequacy opinions, arising from a material...

By extracting detailed birth information for managers of Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2021, we developed a novel measure of overconfidence and applied it to the corporate information disclosure. Our findings demonstrated a close association between managerial overconfidence and both...

We investigate the connection between corporate governance system configurations and the role of intermediaries in the respective systems from a informational perspective. Building on the economics of information we show that it is meaningful to distinguish between internalisation and...

We suggest a test for discovering whether a potential expert is informed of the distribution of a stochastic process. In a non-Bayesian non-parametric setting, the expert is asked to make a prediction which is tested against a single realization of the stochastic process. It is shown that by...

We study a model of collective decision making with endogenous information collection.Agents collect information about the consequences of a project, communicate, and then vote onthe project. We examine under what conditions communication may increase the probability thatgood decisions are made....

The collection of information necessary fordecision-making is often delegated to agents (e.g. bureaucrats,advisors, lawyers). If both the pros and cons of a decision haveto be examined, it is better to use competing agents instead of asingle agent. The reason is that two conflicting pieces...

Innovation is typically a trial-and-error process. While some research paths lead to the innovation sought, others result in dead ends. Because firms benefit from their competitors working in the wrong direction, they do not reveal their dead-end findings. Time and resources are wasted on...

Short-lived agents want to predict a random variable theta and have to decide how much effort to devote to collect private information and consequently how much to rely on public information. The latter is just a noisy average of past predictions. It is shown that costly information acquisition...

This paper puts forth a simple model explaining the manner in which news aggregators such as Google News or Yahoo! News build herd behavior through information cascades. The model suggests that (1) an increase in the number of Internet users will make herding more significant over the Internet,...