Valuing voluntary disclosure using a real options approach

This paper outlines a real options approach to valuing those announcements which are made by firms outside of their legal requirements. From the firm's perspective, information is disclosed only if the manager of the firm is sufficiently certain that the market response to the announcement will have a positive impact on the value of the firm. When debt financing is possible we find that the manager adopts a more transparent disclosure policy, thus violating the Modigliani-Miller theorem on irrelevance of capital structure

The Dampening Effect of Iceberg Orders on Small Traders' Welfare

Iceberg orders, which allow traders to hide a portion of their order size, have become prevalent in many electronic limit order markets. This paper investigates, via a real options analysis, whether small traders, who have no use for submitting iceberg orders, are better off submitting their orders to fully transparent markets which have low depth, or to more liquid markets which do permit the placement of iceberg orders by large traders. Surprisingly, we find that in the context of our model, small traders are better off submitting to fully transparent markets in spite of them being less liquid

The effect of information streams on capital budgeting decisions

In this paper a new decision rule for capital budgeting is considered. A firm has the opportunity to invest in a project of uncertain profitability. Over time, the firm receives additional information in the form of signals indicating the profitability of the project. The belief that the firm needs to have in a profitable project for investment to be optimal is calculated and analyzed. It is shown that the probability of investing in a project with low profitability is larger when the firm uses a conventional rule like the net present value rule. As a counterintuitive result it is obtained that it can be optimal to undertake the investment at a later point in time in case the expected number of signals per time unit is higher. Also an error measure is discussed that indicates the accuracy of capital budgeting rules in this stochastic environment