We present a simple model of managerial reporting bias for a setting in which the capital market is uncertain about the manager's reporting objective. In this setting, the manager's reporting bias reduces the value relevance of the manager's report; that is, it adds noise to the report. Through comparative static results, our model yields insights into factors that affect the slope and intercept terms in a regression of price on earnings. Specifically, we find that the information content of the manager's report, as captured by the earnings slope coefficient, falls as the private cost to the manager of biasing reports falls, and as the uncertainty about the manager's objective increases. We also find that the magnitude of the adjustment for the expected amount of bias, as captured by the absolute value of the intercept, falls as the uncertainty about the manager's objective increases. Finally, to highlight conditions under which managers would lobby to retain an option to bias reports (i.e., retain reporting flexibility), we analyze the effect of the option to bias on the manager's welfare. For example, we show that the ex ante benefit from biasing the report is positive if there is sufficient uncertainty about the manager's reporting objective.

This article analyzes the relation between product quality, the cost of quality, and the information that can be contracted upon. We consider a setting where a risk neutral supplier sells an intermediate product to a risk neutral buyer. The supplier incurs prevention costs to reduce the probability of selling a defective product, and the buyer incurs appraisal costs to identify defects. Both decisions are subject to moral hazard. We show that the first-best outcome can be obtained if either: (i) the supplier's prevention decision is contractible; or (ii) the buyer's appraisal decision and either internal failure (i.e., the product's failing the buyer's appraisal test) or external failure (i.e., the product's failing after being sold by the buyer) are contractible events; or (iii) both internal and external failure are contractible events. We then focus on the second-best setting where actions and failures are not contractible and study the effect of making the buyer's appraisal result contractible. Relative to first-best, if a buyer's return decision is contractible (but not his appraisal result), the supplier incurs lower prevention costs, the buyer incurs higher appraisal costs, expected internal failure costs are higher, and the total cost of quality is higher. The expected costs of external failure, however, may actually be lower relative to first-best. We then show that installing an information system that makes the appraisal result contractible reduces the inefficiency associated with the seller's prevention activity, increases the inefficiency associated with the buyer's quality appraisal activity, and unambiguously improves product quality.information, incentives, quality costs, supply chain

This paper provides evidence that uncontested director elections provide informative polls of investor perceptions regarding board performance. We find that higher (lower) vote approval is associated with lower (higher) stock price reactions to subsequent announcements of management turnovers. In addition, firms with low vote approval are more likely to experience CEO turnover, greater board turnover, lower CEO compensation, fewer and better-received acquisitions, and more and better-received divestitures in the future. These findings hold after controlling for other variables reflecting or determining investor perceptions, suggesting that elections not only inform as a summary statistic, but incrementally inform as well.

This paper examines the relationship between product architecture, supply-chain performance metrics, and supply-chain efficiency. We model the contracting relationship between a supplier and a buyer. The supplier is privately informed about the outcome of his design/production investment. The buyer both appraises the supplier's component and does further processing/component production of his own. If the final product produced by the buyer exhibits decoupling and no function sharing with respect to the components (termed separable architecture), the first-best outcome is attained if both internal and external failures are contractible. When only one type of failure can be contracted on, we derive conditions under which contracting on internal failure is superior to contracting on external failure, and vice versa. If the buyer's final product has a nonseparable architecture with respect to the components, first-best cannot be achieved even if both internal and external failures are contractible. The value of contracting on internal failure alone is unaffected by the architecture design, while that of external failure declines relative to the separable setting; the net result is often to make the former the uniformly dominant performance metric. Our results highlight the interaction between the performance metrics used for contracting within the supply chain, the architecture of the product produced by the supply chain, and the incentive efficiency of the chain.Buyer-Supplier Networks, Agency Theory, Supply Chains, Performance Measurement, Product Architecture

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