This study investigates whether shareholders are willing to pay for higher levels of corporate financial, social, and environmental disclosure. We conduct a choice-based conjoint experiment wherein 65 shareholders are asked to make 12 choices, choosing each time between two predetermined randomized combinations of different levels of investment returns, financial disclosure, environmental disclosure, and social disclosure. Results indicate that whereas shareholders are willing to pay for financial disclosure and environmental disclosure, they are unwilling to pay for social disclosure. Hence, the latter finding does not provide conclusive evidence on the overall question. However, the result that investors are willing to pay for non-financial disclosures – such as environmental information – constitutes our main contribution as prior research has not been able to provide strong evidence that investors are willing to forfeit investment returns in order to gain access to more corporate disclosures. The use of a choice-based conjoint experiment to examine these matters is novel and potentially opens avenues for future research. We believe our theoretical and practical contributions to be of interest to various stakeholders, including firms in making decisions about disclosure levels and regulators in assessing the need for disclosure regulation.

本研究调查股东是否愿意为更高水平的公司财务、社会和环境信息披露支付费用。我们进行了一项基于选择的联合试验，要求 65 名股东做出 12 项选择，每次在不同水平的投资回报、财务披露、环境披露和社会披露的两个预先确定的随机组合之间进行选择。结果表明，虽然股东愿意为财务披露和环境披露支付费用，但他们不愿意为社会披露支付费用。因此，后一个发现并不能为整个问题提供确凿的证据。然而，投资者愿意的结果支付非财务信息披露——例如环境信息——是我们的主要贡献，因为之前的研究未能提供强有力的证据表明投资者愿意放弃投资回报以获得更多的公司信息披露。使用基于选择的联合试验来检验这些问题是新颖的，并可能为未来的研究开辟道路。我们相信我们的理论和实践贡献会引起各种利益相关者的兴趣，包括制定披露水平决策的公司和评估披露监管需求的监管机构。