Restaurant hygiene scores have become a success story of public disclosure of government inspections. Disclosing hygiene scores has the potential to be a powerful market mechanism that can help consumers make better decisions while also creating incentives for restaurants to improve their...

We present evidence that complex disclosure can result from the strategic incentives to shroud information. We implement an experiment where senders are required to report their private information truthfully but can choose how complex to make their reports. We find that senders use complex...

We empirically analyze disclosure decisions made by 240 MBA programs about which rankings to display on their websites. We present three main findings. First, consistent with theories of countersignaling, top schools are least likely to disclose their rankings, whereas mid-ranked schools are...

We present evidence that complex disclosure can result from the strategic incentives to shroud information. We implement an experiment where senders are required to report their private information truthfully but can choose how complex to make their reports. We find that senders use complex...

Disclosure policies have the potential to help consumers and make markets more efficient. Yet, the effectiveness of disclosure policies can be undermined if firms strategically make unfavorable information unnecessarily complicated to understand. To explore the incentives for using complexity in...