We examine a dynamic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of private information. In our model, a manager of a firm who may learn multiple signals over time interacts with a competitive capital market and maximizes payoffs that increase in both period prices. We show (perhaps surprisingly) that in equilibrium later disclosures are interpreted more favorably even though the time the manager obtains the signals is independent of the value of the firm. We also provide sufficient conditions for the equilibrium to be in threshold strategies.

We analyze test design and certification standards when an uninformed seller has the option to generate and disclose costly information regarding asset quality. We characterize equilibria by a minimum principle: the test and disclosure policy are chosen to minimize the asset’s value conditional on nondisclosure. Thus, when sellers choose the information provided, simple pass/fail certification tests are likely to dominate the market. A social planner could raise informational and allocative efficiency, and lower deadweight testing costs, by raising the certification standard. Monopolist certifiers also satisfy the minimum principle but set a higher standard and reduce testing rates to maximize revenue.

We study security-bid auctions in which bidders compete for an asset by bidding with securities whose payments are contingent on the asset's realized value. In formal security-bid auctions, the seller restricts the security design to an ordered set and uses a standard auction format (e.g., first- or second-price). In informal settings, bidders offer arbitrary securities and the seller chooses the most attractive bid, based on his beliefs, ex post. We characterize equilibrium and show that steeper securities yield higher revenues, that auction formats can be ranked based on the security design, and that informal auctions lead to the lowest possible revenues.

A firm raises capital from multiple investors to fund a project. The project succeeds only if the capital raised exceeds a stochastic threshold, and the firm offers payments contingent on success. We study the firm’s optimal unique-implementation scheme, namely the scheme that guarantees the firm the maximum payoff. This scheme treats investors differently based on size. We show that if the distribution of the investment threshold is log-concave, larger investors receive higher net returns than smaller investors. Moreover, higher dispersion in investor size increases the firm’s payoff. Our analysis highlights strategic risk as an important potential driver of inequality.

We consider the strategic timing of information releases in a dynamic disclosure model. Because investors don't know whether or when the firm is informed, the firm will not necessarily disclose immediately. We show that bad market news can trigger the immediate release of information by firms. Conversely, good market news slows the release of information by firms. Thus, our model generates clustering of negative announcements. Surprisingly, this result holds only when firms can preemptively disclose their own information prior to the arrival of external information. These results have implications for conditional variance and skewness of stock returns.

An evidence game is a strategic disclosure game in which an informed agent who has some pieces of verifiable evidence decides which ones to disclose to an uninformed principal who chooses a reward. The agent, regardless of his information, prefers the reward to be as high as possible. We compare the setup in which the principal chooses the reward after the evidence is disclosed to the mechanism-design setup where he can commit in advance to a reward policy, and show that under natural conditions related to the evidence structure and the inherent prominence of truth, the two setups yield the same outcome.