Relevant research found that R&D information disclosure includes both positive motivation such as easing information asymmetry, attracting strategic alliances, and mitigating agency conflicts, and negative motivation such as confusing investors, misleading competitors, and opportunistic manipulation. Therefore, how to identify the R&D information disclosure motivation is an important issue in information disclosure research. Considering the unique explanatory power of enterprise characteristics, this paper comprehensively analyzes the motivation of R&D information disclosure in technology enterprises from the perspective of performance feedback. This paper integrates enterprise behavior theory, strategic reference point theory and dynamic expectation theory to propose the overall category of performance feedback. From the perspective of configuration, performance feedback is a theoretical combination of three current results (performance, backward-looking and forward-looking attainment gap), and two previous results (historical and industry attainment gap). According to the time sequence, this paper determines the anchor points of performance feedback as "previous results" and "current results", and further extends the relationship of two anchor points into three categories: consistent, co-existent, contradictory.Our findings have the following suggestions: (1) any single explanatory attribute of performance feedback does not constitute a necessary condition of high R&D information disclosure of technology enterprises, but forward-looking expectation deficit plays a universal role in high R&D disclosure. (2) The paper found that four recipes—performance feedback—will lead to high R&D information disclosure of technology enterprises, namely, negative consistency under the absence of historical attainment gap (neutral-negative symbiosis), ambiguity under the absence of performance (fuzzy-neutral symbiosis), negative dominance under the historical expectation surplus (fuzzy-negative symbiosis), positive dominance under the industry expectation deficit and forward-looking expectation deficit (fuzzy coincidence), which respectively shows the disclosure motivation of innovation whitewashing, self-interested justification, innovation inclusion and competitive statement. (3) The four configurations that trigger high R&D information disclosure of technology enterprises all have positive market responses, indicating that R&D information disclosure strategy of technology enterprises is effective. The theoretical contributions are as follows: (1) This paper conducts NCA study to examine the necessary relationship between each single explanatory attribute of performance feedback and R&D information disclosure of technology enterprises. Relevant findings break through the limitations of Merkley and other scholars, confirming that poor performance does not necessarily lead to high R&D information disclosure. (2) This paper systematically integrates the five explanatory attributes of performance feedback, which contributed to the understanding of the relationship between the consistent, co-existent, contradictory of previous results and the current results. Previous studies have ignored multiple dimensions of performance feedback, and also failed to focus on R&D information disclosure. This paper systematically integrates performance feedback and develops its interaction, which provides new ideas for subsequent research. (3) This paper makes a more systematic and specific analysis of R&D information disclosure motivations, which has strong practical significance for the decision-making of technology enterprises. Relevant findings not only reveal the motivation of technology enterprises for innovation whitewash, self-interest defense, innovation tolerance and competitive statement, but also put forward requirements for the interpretation ability of external stakeholders. Investors, competitors and other subjects need to understand the "hidden voice" of technology enterprises and master the strategic logic behind R&D information.
Key words
performance feedback /
performance /
attainment discrepancy /
R&D information disclosure /
technology enterprise
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