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The Kind of Silence: Managing a Reputation for Voluntary Disclosure in Financial Markets

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  • Miles B. Gietzmann
  • Adam J. Ostaszewski

Abstract

In a continuous-time setting we investigate how the management of a firm controls a dynamic choice between two generic voluntary disclosure decision rules: one with full and transparent disclosure termed $\it{candid}$, the other, termed $\it{sparing}$, under which values only above a dynamic threshold are disclosed. We show how management are rewarded with a reputational premium for candour. The candid strategy is costly because the sparing alternative shields the firm from potential downgrades following low value disclosures. We show how parameters of the model such as news intensity, pay-for-performance and time-to-mandatory-disclosure determine the optimal choice of candid versus sparing strategy and the optimal time for management to switch between the two. The private news updates received by management are modelled with a Poisson process, occurring between the fixed mandatory disclosure dates, such as fiscal years or quarters, with the news received generated by a background Black-Scholes model of economic activity and of its partial observation. The model presented develops a number of insights, based on a very simple ordinary differential equation (ODE) characterizing equilibrium in a piecewise-deterministic model, derivable from the background Black-Scholes model. It is shown that in equilibrium when news intensity is low a firm may employ a candid disclosure strategy throughout, but will otherwise switch (alternate) between periods of being candid and periods of being sparing with the truth (or the other way about); that is, we are able to characterize when in equilibrium a candid firm will switch to adopting a sparing strategy. The model illustrates how parameters such as time to mandatory disclosure, news intensity and pay-for-performance may drive such switching behaviour. $\it{With\,constant\,pay\,for\,performance\,parameters,\,at\,most\,one\, switching\,occurs.}$

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  • Miles B. Gietzmann & Adam J. Ostaszewski, 2022. "The Kind of Silence: Managing a Reputation for Voluntary Disclosure in Financial Markets," Papers 2210.11315, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2023.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2210.11315
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Viral V. Acharya & Peter DeMarzo & Ilan Kremer, 2011. "Endogenous Information Flows and the Clustering of Announcements," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(7), pages 2955-2979, December.
    2. Adam Ostaszewski & Miles Gietzmann, 2008. "Value creation with Dye’s disclosure option: optimal risk-shielding with an upper tailed disclosure strategy," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 31(1), pages 1-27, July.
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    6. M. Gietzmann & A. J. Ostaszewski & M. H. G. Schroder, 2020. "Guiding the guiders: Foundations of a market-driven theory of disclosure," Papers 2002.04886, arXiv.org.
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    8. Miles B. Gietzmann & Adam J. Ostaszewski, 2016. "The Sound of Silence: equilibrium filtering and optimal censoring in financial markets," Papers 1606.04039, arXiv.org.
    9. Iván Marinovic & Felipe Varas, 2016. "No news is good news: voluntary disclosure in the face of litigation," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 47(4), pages 822-856, November.
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