Algorithmic Window Dressing: Disclosure Structure and Information Horizon Arbitrage
Published in Finance Research Letters (JCR Q1), 2026
As machine readers become the marginal consumer of corporate disclosure, firms gain an incentive to optimise the structure of a filing — its ordering, segmentation, and salience — rather than only its content. This paper formalises that behaviour as algorithmic window dressing and shows that it opens a wedge between the information available to fast, machine-driven investors and to slower human readers.
The result is arbitrage across information horizons, with implications for how disclosure quality should be measured when the audience is partly algorithmic.
Recommended citation: Li, B.*, Chen, A.W., et al. (2026). "Algorithmic Window Dressing: Disclosure Structure and Information Horizon Arbitrage." Finance Research Letters, 108, 110485.
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