Normes d’encadrement

Quel est l’impact des médias sociaux sur les médias sociaux ? Un article publié dans SSRN y répond : James S. Ang, Charles Hsu, Di Tang et Chaopeng Wu, « The Role of Social Media in Corporate Governance » (20 février 2020).

Résumé :

We examine whether social media criticisms posted by small investors can predict subsequent firm acquisition decisions. Specifically, we use textual analysis to examine the Internet stock message board postings of 303 value-reducing acquisition attempts.

Our empirical evidence shows that small investors’ negative postings are able to predict a potential acquirer’s subsequent decision to withdraw its attempt.

We further find that this predictive ability increases with the information quality of postings, and that the predictive information extracted from social media is incremental to that captured by proposal announcement returns, conventional media coverage, analyst reports, and institutional investors’ responses related to the proposed acquisition.

Finally, we show that message board criticisms are also able to predict governance outcomes beyond acquisition decisions.

Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that social media play a role in corporate governance by gathering crowd wisdom and uncovering additional value-relevant information.

À la prochaine…

Bel article de MM. Beni Lauterbach et Anete Pajuste publié le 20 février 2017 sur le blogue Oxford Business Law Blog intitulé : « Does Media Pressure Propel Corporate Governance Improvements: The Case of Dual Class Share Unifications ». Ce travail de recherche revient sur le rôle des médias sociaux en matière de gouvernance d’entreprise en prenant l’illustration du capital-actions à classe multiple. Quels sont les enseignements des auteurs ? Clairement, les médias sociaux ont un rôle à jouer !

Our main conclusion is that media plays an important role in corporate governance promotion. Firms care for their reputation, which is a valuable asset for them; thus firms pay special attention to public opinion and media criticism. Some real firm decisions are influenced by firm image and reputation concerns, and the weight of these concerns probably only grow with the current ‘explosive’ advance of social media and its power.

Another interesting possible conclusion is that media is a powerful and flexible tool that in some cases can substitute for regulation in effectively restraining firms and their controlling shareholders.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian