Finance specialists have long recognized the inability of the standard fullinformation model of the firm's dividend-investment decision to accommodate the now thoroughly documented evidence of dividend-announcement effectseffects that clearly imply asymmetries of information between the investing public and the firm's decision makers. In the absence of a superior alternative, however, they have continued to use many of the main implications of the full information model, especially its investment optimality criterion, in the hope that any "manipulations"o f announcement effects will prove ephemerala nd will be reversed once the truth becomes known.