Disclosure in Context : Information, Energy Efficiency and Commercial Office Workspace Tenure

With the larger objective of improving energy efficiency, this research explores the effects of disclosure in the context of differing forms of commercial office workspace tenure. "Disclosure" refers to the sharing of energy performance information between commercial office workspace tenure stakeholders. The effects of disclosure are those anticipated by, and in addition to those anticipated by, economic Principal-Agent Theory. The quantitative empirical literature reviewed finds that disclosure ex-ante to leasing elicits sales premia, but rental premia of lesser or negligible value. Questioning whether this inconsistency is due to omitted variables, or to the absence of the principal-agent problems disclosure aims to mitigate, led to a review of a second body of literature. That literature measures principal-agent problems by comparing energy performance under contracts subject to a problem, with performance under contracts not subject to that problem. A gap is identified. The energy efficiency of any one workspace may be the effect of not just a single contract, bundled with or without energy, and of a single principal-agent problem, but the effect of multiple contracts, multiple problems, and the degree to which each has been mitigated by disclosure. Filling this gap is lent significance by the increasing prevalence of multi-contract, information-age, sharing-economy, commercial office tenure types such coworking. Through a Bundling and Splitting Matrix conceptual framework, hypotheses are derived as to the relative energy efficiency of different tenure types. A change at the data-source firm resulted in a dataset of insufficient size to confirm or reject the hypotheses. This, coupled with realising the advantages of having a primary data source, led to a change in research objective from measuring principal-agent problems and their mitigation by disclosure, under a post-positivist research paradigm, to exploring these problems and the possibility of their mitiga