An active M&A market incentivizes many firms to specialize in innovation with the anticipation of being acquired in the future. Acquiring innovation, however, is subject to information frictions, because acquirers often find it challenging to assess the value and impact of innovative targets....

This paper studies how the firm designs its internal information system when facing an adverse selection problem arising from unobservable managerial abilities. While more precise information allows the firm to make ex-post more efficient investment decisions, noisier information has an ex-ante...