Hard law, soft edge? Information, consultation and partnership

Hard and Soft Law: What Have We Larned?

Disclosure of Hard vs. Soft Information

This paper studies voluntary disclosure when (a) there is uncertainty about managerial propensity to report truthfully, (b) some components of the firm’s value may be certified for a cost (“hard”), (c) other components may be disclosed but not certified free of misstatements (“soft”). We establish that untruthful managers are more likely to certify hard information and that, among truthful mana...

Loan Origination under Soft- and Hard-Information Lending

This paper presents a novel model of the lending process that takes into account that loan officers must spend time and effort to originate new loans. Besides generating predictions on loan officers’ compensation and its interaction with the loan review process, the model sheds light on why competition could lead to excessively low lending standards. We also show how more intense competition ma...

Bridging the gap between hard and soft information genres

The genre theory has been earlier introduced as a means for analyzing organizational communication. The terms hard and soft information genre have been employed to refer to the extent and explicity of the rules that the genres are enacted by in a particular communication community. People have widely learned to use genres without explicit rules for their purpose, structure, and other features. ...

Fusion of hard and soft information in nonparametric density estimation

This article discusses univariate density estimation in situations when the sample (hard information) is supplemented by “soft” information about the random phenomenon. These situations arise broadly in operations research and management science where practical and computational reasons severely limit the sample size, but problem structure and past experiences could be brought in. In particular...