Disclosure of Nonproprietary Information

In this paper, I provide two theories about why management might withhold information which is not proprietary, together with an analysis of the consequences of altering various assumptions underlying these theories. Proprietary information is considered here as any information whose disclosure potentially alters a firm's future earnings gross of senior management's compensation. Even if a manager's private information is proprietary, shareholders may benefit occasionally from having this information disclosed (see Verrecchia [1983] and Dye [1984a]), although obvious explanations exist for the rarity of such disclosures. However, it is commonly believed that managers possess information about the firms they run, such as annual earnings' forecasts, whose release would affect the prices of their firms, but not the distribution of their firms' future earnings. The reluctance of managers to disclose such nonproprietary information is the subject of this paper.