The underpricing of initial public offerings is a well-documented fact of empirical equity market research. Theories … explain this underpricing with market imperfections. We study three empirically relevant IPO mechanisms under almost perfect … report underpricing in each of these IPO mechanisms. Uncertainty about the aftermarket behavior may partly explain IPO excess …

-discriminatory auctions to bookbuilding. We find that bookbuilding leads to significantly higher underpricing than hybrid price …