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Do Disclosures Of Customer Metrics Lower Investors' And Analysts' Uncertainty But Hurt Firm Performance?, Emanuel Bayer, Kapil R. Tuli, Bernd Skiera

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business

Investors, analysts, and regulators frequently advocate greater disclosure of nonfinancial information, such as customer metrics. Managers, however, argue that such metrics are costly to report, reveal sensitive information to competitors, and therefore will lower future cash flows. To examine these counterarguments, this study presents the first empirical examination of the prevalence and consequences of backward- and forward-looking disclosures of customer metrics by manually coding 511 annual reports of firms in two industries, telecommunications (365 reports) and airlines (146 reports). The results reveal significant heterogeneity in the disclosure of customer metrics across firms and between industries. On average, in both industries, …