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This paper aims to examine the effect of inventory information sharing on inventory efficiency and its intervening effect of information technology (IT) capability in manufacturing firms.

Stratified random sampling and filter questions selected targeted respondents, and an online survey collected 124 completed questionnaires from Malaysian manufacturing firms. partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) examined the structural model and hypothesis statement. An analysis of importance-performance map analysis (IPMA) test identified the relative importance drivers of inventory efficiency.

The findings showed that enhanced IT capabilities in manufacturing firms mediate a positive relationship between inventory sharing and inventory efficiency.

This study portrays the relationship between inventory level, demand and information sharing. The research was carried out only within Malaysian manufacturing firms.

These findings will enable the management of manufacturing firms to design and visualise their inventory levels and share best practices across supply chain networks to achieve effective and optimised inventory planning.

This study illustrates an intervention model that offers a direct and indirect impact of IT capabilities that allow scholars to close inventories productivity gaps in research.

This paper extends the limited literature on the sharing of inventory information and inventory productivity, notably from a strategic management perspective. The findings help scholars clearly understand the information systems capability and its mediating impact on information sharing and inventory efficiency’s relationship in the manufacturing sector. Moreover, demand information sharing affected the dynamic supply chain.

The nature and extent of our knowledge of stock market efficiency are examined. The development of “efficiency”, as a way of thinking about stock markets, is traced from Roberts (1959) and Fama (1965) onward. The early work successfully introduced competitive economic theory to the study of stock markets and paved the way for a flood of empirical research on the relation between information and stock prices. This literature irreversibly altered our views on stock market behavior. The theory and evidence of seemingly‐rational use of information lay in sharp contrast to prior beliefs. It was associated with a widespread increase in respect for stock markets, financial markets, and markets in general, at the time. Researchers began developing and using a variety of formal models of security prices. Nevertheless, “efficiency” has its limitations, both theoretically (as a way of characterizing markets) and empirically (by stretching the quality of the data, the estimation techniques used, and our knowledge of price behavior in competitive markets). Extensive evidence of anomalies suggests either that the market systematically misprices securities or that the theoretical or empirical limitations are binding, or both. The less interesting research question now is whether markets are efficient, and the more interesting question is how we can learn more about price and transactions behavior in competitive stock markets. The concept of an “efficient stock market” has stimulated both insight and controversy since Fama (1965) introduced it to the financial economics literature. As a construct, “efficiency” models the stock market in terms of the reaction of prices to the flow of information. Like all theory choices, modelling the market in this fashion involved tradeoffs. The benefits included opening the literature to an abundance of high‐quality researchable data, covering a variety of information, and the resulting insights obtained on the role of information in setting prices. The opportunity costs included temporarily closing the literature to alternative ways of viewing stock markets, for example by modelling public information as a homogenous good and thus ignoring factors such as differences in beliefs among investors, differences in information processing costs, and the “animal spirits” that might drive group behavior. The costs also included reliance on particular asset‐pricing models of how an “efficient” market would set prices. Not surprisingly, the ensuing deluge of research has produced some startling evidence, for and against the proposition that financial markets are “efficient”. Strongly‐conflicting views and puzzling anomalies remain. The early evidence seemed unexpectedly consistent with the theory. The theory, and its implications, also seemed clear at the time. After a period that seems short in retrospect, the growing body of evidence in favor of the efficient market hypothesis emerged as one of the most influential empirical areas of economics. Fama's (1970) review described a flourishing, coherent and confident literature. This research had an irreversible effect on our knowledge of and attitude toward stock markets, and financial markets generally. It coincided with an emergence of interest in, and respect for, all markets among economists and politicians, and influenced the worldwide trend toward “liberalizing” financial and other markets. The research consistently appeared to show an unbiased reaction of stock prices to public information. The property of “unbiased reaction” to public information, which formed the basis of the early definitions of “efficiency”, was seen to be an implication of rational, maximizing investor behavior in competitive securities markets (Fama 1965, p.4). Reduced to a basic level, the reasoning was that any systematicallybiased reaction to public information is costlessly publicly observable, and thus provides pure profit opportunities to be competed away. Characterizing the market in terms of its reaction to information is only one of many feasible ways of modelling stock price behavior, but it introduced economic theoryto the empirical studyof stock prices, which had received little serious attention from economists prior to that point. Despite the subsequent spate of anomalies, the early efficiency literature not only adapted standard economic theoryto provide the first formal economic insights into how stock prices behave, but it helped pave the way for an outporing of theoretical and empirical work on stock markets and capital markets in general. Subsequent empirical research was not as consistent with the theory. Evidence of “anomalous” return behavior now is widespread and well‐known. It generallytakes the form of variables (for example, size, day‐of‐the‐week, P/E ratio, market/book value ratio, rank of scaled earnings change, dividend yield) that are significantly but inexplicablyrelated to subsequent abnormal stock returns. Much of this evidence has defied rational economic explanation to date and appears to have caused many researchers to strongly qualify their views on market efficiency. Disagreement has not been not confined to the evidence. The literature has produced a variety of research designs, ranging from the “market model” of Fama, Fisher, Jensen and Roll (FFJR, 1969) to Shiller's (1981a,b) variance‐bounds tests. The very term “efficiency” has engendered controversy: there is a modest literature on precisely what efficiency means, on the role of transaction costs, and on whether efficient markets are logically feasible. Making sense of this literature requires careful definition of “efficiency” in this context and careful analysis of the type of evidence that has been offered in relation to it. This involves an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of both the theory of efficient markets, as a way of characterizing stock markets, and of the data and research designs used in testing it. Not surprisingly, a mixed conclusion emerges. While the concept of efficient markets was an audacious departure from the comparative ignorance and suspicion among economists of stock markets that preceded it, and provides valuable insights into their behavior, the concept has its limitations, in terms of both its internal logical coherence and its fit with the data. Section 1 ofthis survey sketches the development of the efficient market theory, reviewing the principal contributions in terms of their usefulness in guiding and evaluating empirical research. Section 2 addresses the limitations inherent in what is knowable about stock market efficiency, given the present state of theory about how security prices might behave in an “efficient” market. It argues that there are binding limitations in the theoryof asset pricing, some of which are known and others of which are unknown or even unknowable. These limitations must be borne in mind when choosing whether to interpret the data as evidence of: (1) market efficiency, under the maintained hypothesis that a specific research design, including a specific model of asset pricing used to benchmark price behavior, correctly describes pricing in an efficient market; or (2) the ability of our models and research designs to encapsulate how prices behave in an efficient market, under the maintained hypothesis of efficiency. Against this background, section 3 then provides an assessment of the accomplishments of the theory of stock market efficiency, including an interpretation of the evidence. It focuses on the nature and influence of the evidence and does not attempt to provide a comprehensive literature taxonomy. The final section offers conclusions. The principal conclusion is that the theory of efficient markets has irreversibly enhanced our knowledge of and respect for stock markets (and perhaps for all financial market or even for markets in general) but that, like all theories, it is fundamentally flawed.

This study aims to evaluate the quality of the energy efficiency disclosures made by Australian cities. As cities are significant energy users, and energy use is a crucial source of greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency initiatives can play an essential role in addressing climate change. Yet, little is understood about the energy efficiency disclosures being made.

The authors developed an original energy efficiency disclosure index to assess the reporting quality of the eight largest Australian cities. The websites of these cities were analysed for information on energy efficiency measures from December 2018 to June 2019. Annual reports, environmental reports, climate action plans and any other material related to energy plans were downloaded and then coded using the index.

While all cities provided energy efficiency information, little financial information was provided, limited forward-looking information was disclosed, key challenges were not disclosed, and each city provided energy efficiency disclosures differently. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that public accountability is limited.

An important implication is the need to standardise and improve cities’ energy efficiency reporting, especially concerning financial information. Cities, governments and the Carbon Disclosure Project (formerly the CDP) could achieve this, perhaps as part of the broader update of the CDP city-focused guidelines for greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting.

Although some studies on GHG reporting by cities have already been undertaken, including energy efficiency as part of their disclosure index, no study has focused on energy efficiency disclosures. The authors provide original insights concerning these practices. The study also provides an energy efficiency disclosure index that can be used in further research.

This research examines how the design of the online energy label can be improved to stimulate consumer choice of energy-efficient household products in Web stores. Based on general evaluability theory, the authors propose new label formats that aim to improve the evaluability of the label information for consumers and test their influence during two distinct stages in the online decision-making process: consideration set formation and final choice.

Two large-scale controlled online experiments are conducted with over 10,000 consumers in 10 European countries. The experiments test label alternatives in simulated online store environments, mimicking the two distinct decision stages, for four product categories to enhance generalizability. The data are analyzed using random-intercept linear and logistic regression models to account for their multi-level structure.

The results show that the impact of the online energy label on consumers’ online decision-making depends on both the label format and the decision stage (consideration vs choice), but in a different way than expected. The findings reveal that the current online energy label is significantly outperformed by a label that provides reference information by incorporating the scale range. This alternative label is particularly effective in the consideration set formation stage, and among consumers who consider energy efficiency a relatively unimportant choice criterion.

Online energy labels encourage consumers to consider and choose more energy-efficient products, especially if scale range information is included. The present results stress the importance of presenting this information early on in the online decision process. They also show that, particularly at this early stage and particularly for consumers who find energy efficiency a relatively unimportant choice criterion, label format matters.

The present findings provide important input for policymakers in the context of the ongoing revision of the EU energy label. They also help online retailers make decisions about when and how to present product information on their websites.

This study contributes to the literature on product labelling by examining the effects of relatively unexplored types of reference information in two distinct stages of the consumer decision-making process. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to test the effectiveness of the online energy label.

Previous literature posits that corporate governance and information asymmetry are the main factors in making efficient investments. Meanwhile, a growing body of studies is of the opinion that corporate governance can also mitigate the problem of information asymmetry and consequently exerts significant impacts on the association between information asymmetry and investment efficiency. This study aims to analyze the impact of corporate governance and information asymmetry on investment efficiency. It also tests the moderating role of corporate governance in the relationship between information asymmetry and investment efficiency.

The sample consists of 4,082 firms domiciled in 20 developed countries over the years from 2003 to 2019, including 33,812 firm-year observations. The bid–ask spread is used as a proxy for information asymmetry. To measure corporate governance performance, a proxy provided by ASSET4 is employed, and to determine the optimal levels of investments, we relied on the growth opportunity. To estimate the models, ordinary least squares and generalized method of moment are used.

The results reveal that information asymmetry is inversely related to investment efficiency, and, corporate governance mitigates this negative association.

This paper sheds light on the role of corporate governance in firms as a lever for mitigating information asymmetry and tries out information asymmetry and agency theories in relation to the impact of information asymmetry on investment efficiency. It also confirms the theory stating that corporate governance can be considered as a determinant of investment efficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the information disclosure quantity on the pricing efficiency of stocks.

Using a sample of large and actively traded Canadian companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the authors utilize annual reports filed on system for electronic document analysis and retrieval (SEDAR) between 2003 and 2013 to estimate the amount of publicly available information and find that the length and size of annual reports are important determinants of short-horizon return predictability from historical order flows, which is an inverse indicator of market efficiency.

The results show that longer and larger annual reports are associated with reduced information asymmetry, lower cost of immediacy, higher trading activity, and an overall improvement in the efficiency of price discovery. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls for various determinants of short-horizon return predictability, such as trading costs, volatility, informational effects and other firm-specific characteristics.

Collectively, the findings provide empirical support for the benefits of detailed corporate disclosure in Canada.

This is the first study to utilize the short-horizon return predictability approach to evaluate the efficiency of price discovery in relation to the amount of information disclosure.

The key purpose of this paper is to quantify the size of the energy-efficiency gap (EEG) for air conditioners at the household level in Delhi. Most of the studies in the EEG tradition broadly define EEG as the difference between the actual and optimal level of energy efficiency. The optimal level of energy efficiency is defined at the societal level (that weigh social costs against social benefits) and the private level (that weigh private costs against private benefits).

The authors base the empirical results in this study on the basis of the primary data collected through in-person interviews of the high-income urban households in Delhi in 2014-2015. The sample of 101 households was collected through purposive random sampling. The survey data include information on type and number of AC possessed, hours of operations, socioeconomic characteristics and awareness and habits of households.

Using primary data of 101 high-income urban household, the paper finds that average EEG is about 10 per cent of total electricity demand of ACs at the household level. The maximum current saving potential measured as a difference between hypothetical energy consumption, if everyone adopts five star ACs, and actual energy consumption is estimated about 14 per cent of the total electricity demand of ACs. Results from the ordinary least squares regressions demonstrate that individual’s habits, attitude, awareness of energy-efficiency measures and perceptions significantly determine the size of the EEG. Among other things, authors’ empirical analysis shows that information can play a central role in guiding investment in energy-efficient technologies. From the analysis of improving access to understandable information about cost savings, payback period and emission reduction, it is found that full information leads to the significant reduction in the size of the expected private energy-efficiency gap from 10 to 2.98 per cent at the household level.

This paper tests the significance of non-economic and non-social factors in determining the size of the EEG. Apart from socioeconomic factors such as income, occupation and education, individual’s energy-conserving habits and attitudes, awareness of energy-efficiency measures and perceptions are other important factors found to have a significant negative impact on the size of the EEG. This is particularly important for the designing of information programs by policymakers for promoting energy-efficiency choices in view of the change that is required in the behavior and attitudes of the households.

In this study, authors try to estimate the size of the EEG of ACs for the high-income urban households in Delhi. The private energy-efficiency gap estimated at 10 per cent of the household demand for ACs indicates existing saving opportunity for the private households. It is found that provision of comprehensive information about cost savings, payback period and emission reduction reduces the size of the EEG significantly from 10 to 2.72 per cent at the private level. This highlights the existence of limited and incomplete information in the market about the possible costs and benefits of energy-efficiency investments. This paper tests the significance of non-economic and non-social factors in determining the size of the energy-efficiency gap. Apart from socioeconomic factors such as income, occupation and education, individual’s energy-conserving habits and attitudes, awareness of energy-efficiency measures and perceptions are other important factors found to have a significant negative impact on the size of the EEG. This is particularly important for the designing of information programs by policymakers for promoting energy-efficiency choices in view of the change that is required in the behavior and attitudes of the households.

This paper examines whether earnings and its components are relevant and sufficient to bridge the gap between banks' market and book values, and also considers if bank efficiency is “value relevant” for banks valuation.

This paper follows the value relevance literature methodology which tests for the difference between book and market values using a variety of indicators including net income and its components as well as bank efficiency (derived using DEA) and risk indicators. The regression models are estimated using OLS, random and fixed effects approaches for a sample of listed Jordanian banks between 1993 and 2004.

The main findings of this paper are twofold. First, it is found that earnings (and its components) are value relevant and explain the gap between market and book values. Secondly, cost efficiency, as an economic performance measure, provides incremental information, not contained directly in banks financial statements, to the market. Overall it is found that the components of net income are more important than aggregate net income in explaining bank value. Furthermore, bank operational efficiency adds incremental information in explaining the gap between market and book value. These results support the view that stock prices aggregate signals received by the market as well as from firm's accounting systems.

The study shows that bank efficiency indicators (along with more traditional accounting measures) help explain market values.

This is one of only a limited number of studies that link bank efficiency to market valuation. It is the first, we believe, to do this for banks operating in an emerging economy.

Networks are natural tools for understanding social and economic phenomena. For example, all markets are characterized by agents connected by complex, multilateral information networks, and the network structure influences economic outcomes. In an earlier study, we undertook an experimental investigation of learning in various three-person networks, each of which gives rise to its own learning patterns. In the laboratory, learning in networks is challenging and the difficulty of solving the decision problem is sometimes massive even in the case of three persons. We found that the theory can account surprisingly well for the behavior observed in the laboratory. The aim of the present paper is to investigate important and interesting questions about individual and group behavior, including comparisons across networks and information treatments. We find that in order to explain subjects’ behavior, it is necessary to take into account the details of the network architecture as well as the information structure. We also identify some “black spots” where the theory does least well in interpreting the data.

This paper aims to examine the extent to which sell-side analysts efficiently incorporate firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities into their earnings forecasts. In addition, this paper also investigate the CSR information efficiency of analysts vis-à-vis that of investors.

This paper measures CSR activities by using CSR strength and CSR concern scores from the Morgan Stanley Capital International Environmental, Social and Governance database. This paper uses analysts’ earnings forecast errors and dispersion as proxies for their information efficiency. To compare the CSR information efficiency of analysts to that of investors, this paper uses the Vt/Pt ratio, which is the equity value estimates inferred from analysts’ earnings forecasts (a proxy for analysts’ CSR information efficiency) to the stock price of the focal company (a proxy for investors’ CSR information efficiency).

The regression analysis indicates that analysts’ earnings forecasts are optimistically biased and more dispersed for firms with positive CSR activities. The paper also finds that analysts’ forecasts are more optimistically biased than investors in interpreting CSR activities.

The lack of standardized protocols in CSR reporting and activities has raised the risk of mispricing by analysts, threatening the stability of sustainable investments. This paper suggests that regulators and standard-setters should establish a uniform framework governing firms’ CSR activities, along with their reporting and measurement, to ensure more consistent and reliable evaluations of CSR practices.

Analysts’ mispricing of CSR activities may distort sustainable investing, as it can overly focus on the positive impacts of stakeholder theory, overlooking agency theory’s warnings about managerial self-interest. Investors need to assess CSR efforts with a dual perspective, acknowledging their societal value but also examining their alignment with shareholder interests.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to assess the efficiency of analysts versus investors in processing CSR information amidst growing sustainable investment interests. Furthermore, building on Dhaliwal et al. (2012), which found that voluntary CSR disclosures correlate with more accurate analyst forecasts, this research provides fresh perspectives on the evolving nature of how analysts assimilate CSR information over time.