Companies that use their own stock to finance acquisitions have incentives to increase their market values prior to the acquisition. This study examines whether such companies mislead investors by issuing overly optimistic forecasts of future earnings (''deception by commission'') or by withholding bad news about future earnings (''deception by omission''). We compare the management forecasts of acquiring firms in a pre-acquisition period (days -90 to -30 before the acquisition announcement) and a post-acquisition period (days ?30 to ?90 after the acquisition is completed). We show that, when acquisitions are financed using stock, companies are not more likely to issue overly optimistic earnings forecasts during the pre-acquisition period compared with the postacquisition period. However, these same acquirers are more likely to withhold impending bad news about future earnings. Consistent with litigation having an asymmetric effect on disclosure incentives, our findings suggest that deception by omission occurs more often than deception by commission.

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The blockchain, with its key characteristics of decentralization, persistence, anonymity, and auditability, has become a solution to overcome the overdependence and lack of trust for a traditional public key infrastructure on third-party institutions. Because of these characteristics, the blockchain is suitable for solving certain open problems in the service-oriented social network, where the unreliability of submitted reviews of service vendors can cause serious security problems. To solve the unreliability problems of submitted reviews, this paper first proposes a blockchain-based identity authentication scheme and a new trusted service evaluation model by introducing the scheme into a service evaluation model. The new trusted service evaluation model consists of the blockchain-based identity authentication scheme, evaluation submission module, and evaluation publicity module. In the proposed evaluation model, only users who have successfully been authenticated can submit reviews to service vendors. The registration and authentication records of users' identity and the reviews for service vendors are all stored in the blockchain network. The security analysis shows that this model can ensure the credibility of users' reviews for service vendors, and other users can obtain credible reviews of service vendors via the review publicity module. The experimental results also show that the proposed model has a lower review submission delay than other models.

SYNOPSIS This paper investigates the association between investor sentiment and accounting conservatism. We find that managers recognize economic losses in earnings in a more timely manner during periods of high investor sentiment. Further, the sentiment-conservatism relation is stronger for firms with greater sentiment-price sensitivity. We also find that the sentiment-conservatism association is stronger for firms with higher litigation risk and financial expert CEOs, and is weaker for firms with retiring CEOs. Overall, our results suggest that firms report earnings more conservatively in response to higher investor sentiment in order to mitigate potential litigation costs. These findings have implications for regulators and standard setters who have deemphasized accounting conservatism in recent years.

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