This paper studies a manager's attempt to maximize his firm's discounted expected profits by choosing what strategic actions to select and what performance measurement system to employ in a setting where the manager is uncertain about what variables ÜdriveÝ the firm's profits, the firm's...

We study a contracting problem where a principal delegates the decision to implement a “project” to an agent who obtains private information about the value of the project before making the implementation decision. Moral hazard arises because the agent gets private random non-contractible...

This paper studies when a firm will acquire additional information about a potential new project by consulting outsiders, when doing so runs the risk of reducing the value of implementing the project as a consequence of information leakage. The analysis evaluates the firm's information...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>This paper studies managers' preferences among information acquisition and disclosure policies when their firms are required to engage in "real-time" or "continuous" financial reporting. The paper predicts that for many, but not all, processes describing the distribution of their firms'...

In an agency setting where the agent must be compensated both to exert effort to produce a new project and to announce honestly when the new project has been produced, we show that Holmstrom's (1979) well-known "informativeness criterion" does not, by itself, determine whether a variable is...

We develop a positive theory of accounting standards when standards generate network externalities and differ in the amount of reporting discretion, or flexibility, they provide firms. We evaluate expected value-maximizing firms' preferences between two standards regimes, rigid and flexible, as...