A firm can merge with one of n potential partners. The owner of each firm has private information about both his firm's stand-alone value and a component of the synergies that would be realized by the merger involving his firm. We characterize incentive-efficient mechanisms in two cases. First,...

We study for a sample of international mergers and acquisitions the effectiveness of three takeover bidding strategies first in preventing bidder contests and second, if a contest has occurred, in increasing the probability of a successful offer. Our results indicate that support for the...

This paper develops an auction design framework to analyze various methods for assessing “fair value” in post-merger appraisal proceedings. Our inquiry spotlights an approach recently embraced by some courts benchmarking fair value against the merger price itself. We show that merger price...

While acquisitions are a popular form of investment, the link between firms' financial constraints and acquisition policies is not well-understood. We develop a model in which financially-constrained bidders decide when to approach the target, how much to bid, and whether to bid in cash or...

In a private values, open auction, we show that bidder surplus can be expressed as a simple difference between unconditional moments of order statistics. The strength of the result is its simplicity and generality, as we dispense with the typical assumptions of independence and/or symmetry. We...

We examine takeover auctions when an informed bidder has better informationabout the target value than a rival and target shareholders. The informed bidder'sinformation is either hard or soft, and only hard information can be credibly disclosed.We show that withholding information creates a...

We study the dynamic profit-maximizing selling mechanism in an M&A environment with costly bidder entry and without entry fees. Depending on the parameters, the optimal mechanism is implemented by a standard auction, or by a two-stage procedure with exclusive offers to one bidder followed by an...

We consider takeover bidding in a Cournot oligopoly when firms have private information concerning the synergy effect of merging with a takeover target and bidders can influence rivals' beliefs through their bids. We compare cash and profit-share auctions, first- and second-price, supplemented...

A firm can merge with one of n potential partners. The owner of each firm has private information about both his firm's stand-alone value and a component of the synergies that would be realized by the merger involving his firm. We characterize incentive-efficient mechanisms in two cases. First,...