Informational costs and benefits of creating separately identifiable operating segments

We provide an informational theory for how the ownership claims to a firm might be structured. When the market price of equity provides valuable contracting information there is a benefit to creating separate ownership claims to each of a firm's divisions. However, creating this information also generally has adverse incentive effects because it enriches the agent's strategy space. We show in a complete contracting setting that under a large class of agencies the firm is strictly better off bundling the ownership claims to divisions that are sufficiently similar and creating separate ownership claims only to divisions that are sufficiently different. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.