Working Paper No. 00018-00
This paper studies the classic information-sharing problem in a duopoly setting in which firms learn information from a financial market. By disclosing information, a firm incurs a proprietary cost of losing competitive advantage to its rival firm but benefits from learning from a more informative asset market. Firms' disclosure decisions can exhibit strategic complementarity, which is strong enough to support both a disclosure equilibrium and a nondisclosure equilibrium. Allowing minimal learning from asset prices dramatically changes firms' disclosure behaviors: without learning from prices, firms do not disclose at all; but with minimal learning from prices, firms can almost fully disclose their information. Learning from asset prices benefits firms, consumers, and liquidity traders, but harms financial speculators.
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