Information disclosure with leakages

We present a trading game with one insider, many outsiders, liquidity traders and a competitive market maker trading an asset with two value components, a private and a shared one, in a market operating as in Kyle (1985). The insider knows both value components and outsiders only know the shared component. The market maker receives a private signal in the form of a noisy transformation of the shared component, which we refer to as leakages. Before trade begins, the insider can disclose the value of the shared component to the entire market, thus removing the outsiders from the game. When the market maker's signal is sufficiently precise, the insider's benefit from knowing the shared component does not exceed the cost of concurrently trading with the outsiders, thus motivating the insider to reveal the shared component to the entire market. This result provides an explanation as to why some firm managers may naturally prefer to publicly disclose information rather than leaving it in the hands of select investors. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.