David F. Larcker, Short-Term Compensation Contracts and Executive Expenditure Decisions: The Case of Commercial Banks, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Mar., 1987), pp. 33-50

In order for security prices to be informationally efficient, incentives must exist for traders to engage in costly information acquisition. This paper provides empirical evidence on this proposition. We observe that risk arbitrageurs (i.e., market participants who trade in securities of firms that are involved in mergers, tender offers, and voluntary liquidations) are able to generate private information regarding the success or failure of corporate reorganizations. Moreover, risk arbitrageurs earn substantial returns on their trading activities. These results suggest that security prices are sufficiently noisy to create incentives for costly information acquisition.

Richard A. Lambert, David F. Larcker, An Analysis of the use of Accounting and Market Measures of Performance in Executive Compensation Contracts, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 25, Studies on Stewardship Uses of Accounting Information (1987), pp. 85-125