Selective disclosure aversion continues to motivate research on management communication with outsiders (e.g., Frankel, Johnson, and Skinner 1999; Bushee, Jung, and Miller 2017). Selective disclosure creates an “unlevel playing field.” The metaphor evokes a queasy sense of unfairness that must somehow be relieved, perhaps by prohibition. As the quotation above suggests, this discussion argues for discarding the “level playing field” analogy rather than resharpening it. I argue that it evokes an adverse presumption not supported by current evidence. And more specifically, the purpose of this discussion is to make explicit the arguments for and against selective disclosure to encourage their empirical examination.1
One way to view a management behavior—like speaking to select analysts at an investment-banker-organized conference—is that it is likely to be “efficiency” or value maximizing. According to this view, managers speak to small groups of analysts because such disclosures somehow maximize shareholder value. Competition pushes...
