Comparative Statics of Disclosure Statements
研究了金融公司披露声明如何通过信息分类影响消费者决策，发现消费者对事件风险的态度决定了公司合并昂贵事件类别是否提高利润。
Financial companies often use disclosure statements (DSs) to categorize uncertain contingencies into different sections (e.g., a health insurance plan includes sections such as “hospital coverage” and “dental coverage”). We model DSs as information partitions of the state space, which influence how a consumer perceives her choice problem and how she makes her demand decisions. We study a consumer with weakly separable preferences, which allows us to define event-risk attitude to the DS’s categories. Our main results show that aggregating the more expensive events into a coarser DS decreases a firm’s profit if and only if the consumer is event-risk averse. The opposite result holds for event-risk loving. Our findings can be extended to a more general class of consumer preferences and provide insights into the optimal design of DSs. This paper was accepted by Ilia Tsetlin, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4742 .