ABSTRACT We model two competing firms, each operating through their controlled subsidiaries while also holding a minority financial stake in their rival’s subsidiary. Under such cross-ownership, we derive the firms’ optimal disclosure policies, showing how they are affected by technological spillovers, competitive intensity, and the nature of product markets. The results demonstrate that cross-ownership induces more disclosures, benefiting the firm because disclosures promote the profit of its subsidiary (at low spillover values) or the rival’s subsidiary (at high spillover values). The increased transparency under cross-ownership can generate Pareto gains, improving consumer surplus and firm profits relative to separate ownership. This unifying finding holds under quantity and price competition, challenging the view that cross-ownership leads firms to collude, harming consumers. Additionally, with cross-ownership, high-spillover disclosures occur more under price than quantity competition. Thus, price competition can generate Pareto gains, contradicting the view that it favors consumers at the expense of firms. JEL Classifications: D43; D60; D82.

This paper extends a familiar model of competition and disclosure to incorporate the practical feature that firms may not only hold private information about consumer demand, but they can also influence demand by the investments they make in improving product quality. Such investments can reflect installing new product features, improving durability, adding design enhancements, and the like. This paper demonstrates that investments stand to significantly influence the firm's preference for disclosures and, in fact, become a determining feature of disclosure choice. In particular, under Cournot competition, a firm prefers disclosure when the industry‐wide effects of information and investments are concordant. That is, if both product quality and demand information have large positive industry spillovers, disclosure is desirable because it promotes implicit cooperation in investments; if both have low spillover, disclosure permits a firm to convey strength to a rival and then use quantity and quality in concert to dominate the market precisely when the firm's demand is at its peak.

In this paper, we embed the double entry accounting structure in a simple belief revision (estimation) problem. We ask the following question: Presented with a set of financial statements (and priors), what is the reader's “best guess” of the underlying transactions that generated these statements? Two properties of accounting information facilitate a particularly simple closed form solution to this estimation problem. First, accounting information is the outcome of a linear aggregation process. Second, the aggregation rule is double entry.