Censorship and Reputation
研究企业如何通过投资产品质量和审查负面信息来管理声誉，发现审查成本不同会导致截然不同的均衡结果，对理解企业信息披露策略有参考价值。
I study how a firm manages its reputation by both investing in the quality of its product and censoring, hiding bad news from consumers. Without censorship, the threat of bad news provides strong incentives for investment. I highlight discontinuities in the firm’s maximum equilibrium payoff that censorship creates. When censorship is inexpensive, the firm never invests and a patient firm’s payoffs approach the lowest possible. In contrast, when censorship is moderately expensive, there exist equilibria where product quality is persistently high and payoffs approach the first-best, which can exceed the maximum equilibrium payoff if it was unable to censor.