Voluntary disclosure under uncertainty about the reporting objective

The extensive research toward an understanding of corporate voluntary disclosure strategies has primarily aimed at explaining why firms do not fully disclose their private information in capital markets with rational expectations. Following a variety of theories that explain the withholding of information, this paper highlights the uncertainty of investors about the reporting objective of managers as another explanation. The paper also studies how uncertainty about the reporting objective interacts with other factors known to suppress disclosure, exploring that the common intuition regarding these factors does not always carry over to environments with an uncertain reporting objective.