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Contemporary Accounting Research Vol. 39 No. 4 2022

Selective Disclosure, Expertise Acquisition, and Price Informativeness*

Bjorn Jorgensen1; Jing Li2; Nahum D. Melumad3

1 Copenhagen Business School and Hanken School of Economics · 2 The University of Hong Kong · 3 Columbia University

Abstract

We examine how a firm's disclosure‐audience policy affects investors' expertise acquisition and price informativeness in the market. We distinguish the investors' information advantage due to superior access from that due to superior ability to process information. We show that targeted selective disclosure to sophisticated investors may encourage greater expertise acquisition on the part of investors and lead to more informative prices than either public disclosure or untargeted selective disclosure, because the value of expertise is maximized if sophisticated investors gain exclusive information access at a relatively low cost. These results illuminate the persistence of private communications between investors and firms in the post–Regulation Fair Disclosure era and provide implications for regulators in addressing increasing concerns raised about the enforcement of Regulation Fair Disclosure.

DOI
10.1111/1911-3846.12786
Volume
39
Issue
4
Pages
2305-2337
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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