The Informational and Strategic Impacts of Real Earnings
Management

Shirley J. Ho

and

Hao-Chang Sung

We address the informational and strategic impacts of real earnings management (REM) in a two-period oligopoly model with one-sided information. For the strategic impacts of REM, once the demand falls short of expectation, a firm should raise the price instead of cutting it to reach the earnings target. For the informational impacts, to maintain opponents' uncertainty, the privately informed firm could conceal its identity by taking a mixed strategy and setting the first period price to be higher than in the separating equilibrium. Finally, the presence of tunneling from cross-shareholding firm will enhance the price cut in the second period.