Resumen de Investment decisions and the signalling effects of financial information flows: Vickers shipyard 1913–1924
Businesses that operate in acutely cyclical industries like shipbuilding are more dependent than most on the quality of the information flows that report the outcomes of their various decisions. This article, an extended version of the twenty-first Peter Davies Lecture in Maritime Business History, examines the relationship between decisions to invest in fixed assets and long-term contract work in the shipbuilding industry and cost allocation practices on the way that operational success or failure is signalled, using internal data from the Vickers shipyard archive across the ‘trans-war’ period 1913–1924.
