Can You Trust the Blockchain? The (Limited) Power of Peer-to-Peer Networks for Information Provision

joint with Benedikt Franke and André Stenzel

forthcoming at Management Science

Disclosure of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Recently, regulators worldwide required or proposed to require firms to disclose their emission information. To better evaluate the potential effects and the efficacy of such mandates, I propose an analytical model to investigate firms’ emission investment and disclosure decisions. In the model, two firms engage in Cournot competition in a product market where consumers may dislike products’ emissions. Disclosing the emission level not only indicates the firm’s environmental performance but also reveals how firms exploit the environment in their production process. The results show the potential existence of different disclosure equilibria, which implies different disclosure patterns in different industries. Nondisclosure is not an unambiguous signal for high emissions. More importantly, conducting and revealing emission abatement activities changes firms’ disclosure decisions regard- ing their emission level. Because of this effect, firms consider subsequent disclosure strategies when making abatement decisions. I further identify that disclosure mandates may have an adverse effect on firms’ abatement incentives.

Label to match - Firms’ signaling decisions when not everyone cares

I investigate how different degrees of assurance—one key feature of ESG reporting—may influence firms’ disclosure behavior while considering the heterogeneity of different industries. These industry differences include different levels of information demand, different mar- ket structures, such as competitor numbers and sizes, and different buyer structures. First, higher information demand unambiguously increases firms’ incentive to disclose and seek assurance. Second, industry heterogeneity also shapes firms’ disclosure strategies.

NPO’s coordination problem in the donation market – does impact reporting matter”

joint with Michael Ebert and Dirk Simons

We conduct a descriptive model of optimal NPO disclosures in a setting of NPOs that provide non-scalable public goods and compete for donations. By the nature of non-scalable public goods, the donors face a coordination problem, and the NPOs face an information design problem. Initial findings show that disclosures about the current funding level and/or about the value of the public good would help donors to coordinate on a universally preferred equilibrium.