Knowledge that Transforms

People who use venues for productive conversations impose norms (“LAAPs”) encouraging statements that are meaningful, relevant, honest, understandable, diplomatic, engaging, helpful, and supportive of the long-term success of the venue. Statements that undermine productivity by falling short on some of these characteristics without sufficient strength on others are excluded, policed and punished as “crebit”. I describe a variety of LAAPs and their crebit, use the framework to offer testable predictions about when speech will be punished as crebit, and propose some exclusions that would allow more productive conversations online and about the limits of speech on campus.

In vertical relationships, when a contract is incomplete, underinvestment problems can arise because a seller's sunk investment costs are ignored in ex post negotiation with a buyer. In this situation, this research examines how the seller's strategic delegation in bargaining using stock options can mitigate the investment hold-up problem in vertical relationships. Under the strategic delegation in bargaining using stock options, the investment cost is not sunk and it is a relevant cost from a manager's perspective because the sunk investment cost is now reversible depending on the manager's exercise decision of stock options. Thus, under the strategic delegation, the reversible sunk costs become relevant costs in the ex post negotiation and the relevant investment costs increase transaction price in the negotiation. The resulting increased transaction price improves the seller's profit, and the improved return on investment induces the first-best level of investment by the seller firm. Unlike previous research, the first-best level of investment can be achieved without relying on any ex ante agreement and renegotiation. The bargaining effect of stock options is robust so that the first-best result can be still obtained when an endogenous exercise price, bilateral investments, cooperative investments, and a simple moral hazard problem are considered.

We report the results of 18 experimental markets designed to investigate the effect of the information environment on informed traders' performance. In our experiment, traders bid to acquire costly, imperfect information on asset value and then take part in a double-auction asset market. We posit that the nature of the information environment, distinguished by the cost of information, affects traders’ ability to prosper. Using the inverse relationship between cost of information and number of informed traders, we study whether traders can properly determine the value of the information under enriched and impoverished environments. In our experiment, the enriched environment includes a significant number of informed traders, whereas the impoverished environment has few informed traders. We find that traders in an impoverished environment pay too much for information and, once informed, they do not transact enough to recover the cost of information acquisition. Traders who compete for information that confers a larger information advantage are worse off than those who compete in an environment in which information is more widely available.

In this commentary on “Do features that associate managers with a message magnify investor's reactions to narrative disclosures?” by Asay, Libby, and Rennekamp (2018), I discuss issues regarding the experimental methods commonly used to study the effects of narrative financial disclosures. First, I suggest a broader view of the complementarity of experimental and archival research. Second, experimental methods provide an opportunity to design materials that use minimal representations of phenomena of interest or to use a broader, 360°, approach in depicting the phenomena; I argue the latter approach is a valid option. Third, I note concerns about the ubiquitous “process” or mediation testing in many financial accounting experiments. Fourth, I argue that the use of online participant population can be improved through better screening, to parallel the screening we use with student participant groups. Fifth, I summarize comments by conference participants that questioned the source of corporate disclosure style choices and investor style expectations. The paper concludes with a call for a framework to organize and understand the myriad of financial disclosure style choices made by firm management.

I describe a brief summary of the development of databases used in accounting research and discuss the research questions addressed in traditional databases and ‘new’ databases. The new data include online searches such as Google Trends data; textual data from corporate disclosures, analyst reports, conference call transcripts, earnings press releases, and news media articles; social network and social media data from Twitter, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and other data. New data holds promise for research on attention or cognitive processing constraints; on tone/valence, affect, deceptiveness and credibility for capital market and financial reporting outcomes. I examine the econometric challenges of new data and suggest the potential for new data to offer new auditing tools to detect poor financial reporting, which will help to discourage earnings management.

Investments that are classified as Level 2 within the fair value hierarchy account for approximately 92 percent of US banks' fair value assets. We report an experiment that examines how experienced auditors apply current PCAOB guidance when auditing portfolios of these assets. We hypothesize and find that, depending on how overstatement is distributed within a portfolio, current PCAOB guidance leads auditors to make adjustments that are predictably larger or smaller than the aggregate overstatement in the portfolio. Auditors are more likely to follow PCAOB guidance when doing so leads to lower audit adjustments and higher client income. We also predict and find that auditors identify some patterns of overstatement as indicative of management bias, but not others. However, management-bias assessments do not affect auditors' adjustment decisions as standards imply they should, even when auditors are prompted to consider management bias. Together, these results highlight a potential deficiency in current auditing guidance that managers could exploit by strategically locating overstatements within securities with larger book values or by spreading those overstatements across many securities within a portfolio. We suggest changes to current PCAOB guidance which may reduce these effects.

Baginski, Demers, Kausar, and Yu (2018) demonstrate that small, retail investors often misinterpret the linguistic tone contained in managerial forecast announcements during the 1997-2006 time period. This is in contrast to the trading behavior of large, institutional investors. My commentary offers some concerns/suggestions about the measurement of linguistic tone, the separation of small and large traders’ activities, the implications of this type of research for regulatory actions, and includes possible additional research suggested by their paper.