Acquisition and Disclosure of Operational Information*

Abstract

We study a firm's strategy for acquisition and disclosure of operational information by establishing linkages among information quality, managerial self-interest, and production planning. We develop a multistage model in which a manager of a publicly traded firm first receives private information about the product demand and then uses it to make production and disclosure decisions. We consider two prevalent disclosure models employed in the accounting literature: all-or-nothing and cheap-talk models. In the all-or-nothing model, it is assumed that any disclosure must be truthful, but the manager can strategically withhold information. We show that the manager commits to acquire the value-added operational information if (i) the managerial self-interest in the interim share price is low or (ii) the managerial self-interest in the interim share price is high, but the fixed disclosure cost is either sufficiently low or sufficiently high. We demonstrate that the firm is better off if the production level is observable to the financial market because multidimensional signaling reduces costs. In the cheap-talk model, we assume that the manager's disclosure may not be truthful. We show that the manager's incentive to acquire value-added operational information increases along with the penalty cost for misleading investors. Therefore, a high penalty cost for misleading investors can encourage the manager to obtain more precise information, which in turn improves the firm's cash flow.