Professor Xu Jiang explains how disclosure rules shape companies’ decisions, competition and the way investors process information.

Corporate disclosures include more than financial statements. Companies also share information about environmental, social and governance activities, product development and other issues that matter to investors, employees, customers and suppliers.

But deciding how much to disclose can be difficult: information that excites investors may also help competitors piece together a company’s strategy.

In this episode, Professor Xu Jiang of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business discusses how mandatory and voluntary disclosure affect companies and their stakeholders. Regulators establish minimum requirements, but companies retain discretion over what they consider “material” and how much detail to provide. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, may use press releases to share progress on a drug before they can recognize related revenue in their financial statements.

The frequency of disclosure can also influence managerial decisions. If companies report earnings every quarter, managers may face pressure to meet analysts’ forecasts by cutting promising research and development projects. Reporting less frequently may reduce that pressure, but more frequent reporting can also help investors monitor managers and discourage them from using company resources for projects that do not benefit shareholders. “The important trade-offs are how would the disclosure affect the firm's real investment decisions, and how would that affect competitors' investments — which may in turn further affect the firms’ decisions,” Jiang said.

The way information is presented matters, too. Detailed disclosures may benefit institutional investors with the resources to analyze them, while making it harder for individual investors to find important information. In some cases, less detailed disclosures such as summaries may reduce this gap.

For MBA students and business leaders, Jiang emphasizes the importance of considering managers’ incentives and the long-term effects of disclosure rules. “Do not get easily fooled by the manager,” he said. Sometimes, improved earnings may reflect cost-cutting “that sacrifices the firm’s long-term future.”

Duke Fuqua Insights features digestible conversations with our faculty about the most impactful research from their careers, including studies they teach in Fuqua classes. New episodes every other week in season.

For more from Duke Fuqua, visit us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and the Duke Fuqua Insights newsletter.

Professor Rick Larrick explains how to focus on high-impact climate decisions and communicate them effectively.

Climate change can leave people feeling that they must do everything or that nothing they do matters. The scale of the problem, other people’s inaction, and alarming media coverage can all make people feel overwhelmed and lead them to avoid thinking about climate altogether.

In this episode, Professor Rick Larrick discusses a more practical approach: focusing on environmental decisions that have the greatest impact. Larrick, whose research examines judgment, decision making, social psychology, organizational behavior, and environmental decisions, also describes his forthcoming course in Duke’s Master in Business, Climate and Sustainability.

Larrick identifies transportation, food, and home heating as three large categories of personal carbon emissions. For transportation, he points to driving less when possible and considering the next car purchase; for food, he highlights eating less beef and moving toward more plant-based protein. For homes, he describes opportunities such as heat pumps, insulation, and smaller homes that require less heating.

The goal is not an all-or-nothing approach. “The perfect can be the enemy of the good,” Larrick says. He contrasts high-impact choices with actions with little impact on carbon emissions, such as recycling and turning off lights. He cites “single-action bias”: when people choose one visible environmental action, they may feel they have done enough while in fact they are leaving more substantive sources of emissions untouched.

Larrick’s research on the “miles-per-gallon illusion” shows why the metric can lead consumers to overlook the largest fuel savings. Replacing a 10-mpg vehicle with a 20-mpg one saves five gallons per 100 miles, while replacing a 20-mpg vehicle with a 50-mpg only saves three. The biggest gains, he says, come from moving vehicles out of the teens and into the 20-to-30-mpg range. To make those savings clearer, updated vehicle labels show five-year fuel use, cost, and how a vehicle compares with the average.

In Duke’s Master in Business, Climate and Sustainability program, Larrick will focus on how people with environmental knowledge can influence organizations, even when they are not the ones making the final decisions. The course will examine how to communicate environmental issues so that others understand their value and why they should care, helping students shape better decisions with good information.

Duke Fuqua Insights features digestible conversations with our faculty about the most impactful research from their careers, including studies they teach in Fuqua classes. New episodes every other week in season.

For more from Duke Fuqua, visit us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and the Duke Fuqua Insights newsletter.

Professor David McAdams explores how information overload changes what we know, with lower-quality ideas receiving less scrutiny before spreading

Every day, people decide which headlines to read, which social media posts to believe, and which recommendations deserve attention. As information becomes faster and cheaper to produce, the challenge is deciding what is worth trusting.

In this episode of Fuqua Insights Podcast, Professor David McAdams of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business discusses his research on how information spreads through social interactions and what happens when the volume of information overwhelms people's limited attention. Drawing on game theory and what he describes as economic epidemiology, McAdams centers the conversation on his recent paper examining how changes in the information environment shape collective knowledge.

The paper's central finding is that increasing the volume of information can reduce the reliability of what people collectively know. McAdams argues that information spreads through "social transmission chains," where people decide whether to remember, share, or ignore what they encounter. As more information floods the system, people have less capacity to process each idea, causing those transmission chains to become shorter. The result is a trade-off in which "people know more, but they're dumber," he said.

McAdams explains that limited attention is the mechanism driving this outcome. Because people cannot fully process an endless stream of information, they rely less on careful social filtering. "When there's an abundance of information, there's a scarcity of attention," he explains. With fewer opportunities for information to be evaluated and passed through multiple people, ideas receive less scrutiny before spreading. He also notes that AI may further change this dynamic by making information easier to produce, access, and summarize, while also reshaping how people interact with information networks.

McAdams emphasizes that organizations should intentionally design how information is shared rather than relying on informal conversations alone. He points to approaches that encourage independent judgment, structured evaluation, and thoughtful dissemination of information before decisions are made. At the same time, he notes that social interactions remain valuable because they help refine and improve ideas over time. As organizations increasingly adopt AI tools and navigate growing information flows, designing effective information environments becomes an increasingly important leadership challenge.

Duke Fuqua Insights features digestible conversations with our faculty about the most impactful research from their careers, including studies they teach in Fuqua classes. New episodes every other week in season.

For more from Duke Fuqua, visit us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and the Duke Fuqua Insights newsletter.