Finance Seminar: Associate Professor Ling Cen

Speed Matters: Supply-Chain Information Diffusion and Price Feedback Effects

This paper provides evidence of price feedback effects in a supply-chain setting using the speed with which information diffuses from customer to supplier stock prices to identify private supply-chain information in prices. We find that the speed of supply-chain information diffusion positively (negatively) affects the sensitivity of supplier investment to its own (customer’s) price. These results are consistent with learning from prices and suggest that supplier managers vary their reliance on their own versus their customer’s stock prices depending upon their relative price informativeness. Consistent with supplier managers using information in prices to make better investment decisions, we find that higher speed of supply-chain information diffusion predicts positive future supplier performance and enhances investment coordination between suppliers and customers.

Associate Professor Ling Cen

Prof. Ling Cen is an Associate Professor of Finance at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Before joining CUHK, he was an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Toronto. His early research was mainly on behavioural finance. In his recent work, he conducts interdisciplinary studies of corporate finance and operations management, focusing on the role of supply-chain relationships on various aspects of corporate decisions. He is also interested in the role of buy-side and sell-side analysts in earnings conference calls. His papers have been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, The Accounting Review, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Review of Finance.