The tone of business model disclosure: an impression management analysis of the integrated reports

The rising emphasis on the business model (BM) as a reportable element reflects the view that it constitutes one of the key starting points for investors’ analysis. In spite of this, recent academic and professional studies describe current reporting on BMs as uninformative: too optimistic, generic and incomplete. The International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) claims that these limitations may be overcome by means of an “Integrated Report”, an innovative report which is expected to offer a complete and balanced representation of how organizations create value by mean of their BMs. The paper investigates the informativeness of BM disclosure questioning whether companies adopt impression management (IM) strategies by manipulating the tone of the BM disclosures provided in their reports. We perform a manual content analysis of all the reports identified in the IIRC website and a multivariate statistical analysis to assess if a positive tone of BM disclosure is significantly associated with weak corporate governance, bad performance and low verifiability of the disclosure itself. Our findings support the idea that managers use BM disclosure as an IM strategy. This evidence has relevant implications for both accounting scholars and practitioners, since it questions the role of integrated reporting in improving corporate reporting on BMs.