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...

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...