Withholding Technical Information

Withholding Information to Protect a Loved One.

Parents respond to the death of a child in very different ways. Some parents may be violent or angry, some sad and tearful, some quiet and withdrawn, and some frankly delusional. We present a case in which a father's reaction to his daughter's death is a desire to protect his wife from the stressful information. The wife is in the second trimester of a high-risk pregnancy and so is particularly...

Coarse Grades: Informing the Public by Withholding Information

Certifiers of quality often report only coarse grades to the public despite having measured quality more finely, e.g., “Pass” or “Certified” instead of “73 out of 100”. Why? We show that coarse grades result in more information being provided to the public because the coarseness encourages those of middling quality to apply for certification. Dropping exact grading in favor of the best coarse g...

Variation in withholding of information in three monkey species.

Studies on tactical deception have reported that informed subordinates can withhold information from naive dominants, but they have not directly compared species' performance. Here, we compared the performance in two withholding-of-information tasks of three monkey species differing in the strictness of their dominance hierarchy and degree of fission-fusion dynamics: spider monkeys, capuchin mo...

The Dynamics of Concealment: CEO Myopia and Information Withholding

We propose a dynamic model of corporate disclosure in which managers’ information endowment is uncertain. We consider a realistic environment in which corporate disclosures are preceded by analyst’ consensus forecasts and followed by earnings announcements. We estimate the model using a comprehensive sample of annual management forecasts released by public U.S. companies between 2004 and 2014. ...

Defense Technical Information Center