  A new mechanism for causing naked singularities is found in an effective
superstring theory. We investigate the gravitational collapse in a spherically
symmetric Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton system in the presence of a pure
cosmological constant "potential", where the system has no static black hole
solution. We show that once gravitational collapse occurs in the system, naked
singularities necessarily appear in the sense that the field equations break
down in the domain of outer communications. This suggests that in generalized
theories of gravity, the non-minimally coupled fields generically cause naked
singularities in the process of gravitational collapse if the system has no
static or stationary black hole solution.
