Narrow Results

In deciding how much customer information to disclose, managers face a tradeoff between the benefits of reducing information asymmetry and the losses of revealing proprietary information. This paper investigates which factors affect the level of ambiguous customer identity disclosure and whether such ambiguous disclosure affects the cost of equity capital. The empirical evidence shows that the proprietary cost is a crucial factor in ambiguous customer identity disclosure. Firms with a higher level of ambiguous customer identity disclosure generate a higher cost of equity capital. Moreover, the higher cost of equity capital is concentrated among firms under imperfect market competition.