Advances in Mergers and Acquisitions: Volume 11

The topic of mergers and acquisitions continues to be of central interest to both academic and managerial audiences. While much of the world is in recession in 2012, there have been signs of an M&A re-awakening that reflects the fact that corporate growth is always a top priority for CEOs and boards. Academics have similarly picked up the pace of research on all sorts of topics related to mergers and acquisitions, and this volume of excellent articles is a perfect showcase for some of the best of this work.

Anticipating mergers and acquisitions (M&A) helps executives and investors to design their firms’ strategies and decide on their investments. However, a review of the literature shows that we know relatively little about the determinants of M&A activity, and that former research often falls short of theoretical foundations. Hence the question: in what conditions can we make accurate practical predictions of M&A activity? Relying on neo-institutional theory, we suggest that M&A activity gains from being predicted at national level and that its determinants tend to depend on the country under scrutiny. We also draw on economic contagion theory pertaining to linkages between national economies to identify possible foreign institutional influences on a country's M&A activity. We tested our framework in three countries, the United States, the UK, and Japan, with a prediction model based on the Kalman filter that is rarely used in the field of international business. Our findings broadly corroborate our hypotheses, show the relevance of neo-institutional theory for studying the topic, and confirm that accurate practical predictions of M&A activity can be made at national level.

Though alliances and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are both extensively used by companies seeking to achieve the benefits of greater size and scale, strategy research has rarely examined these two moves as alternative courses of action. Indeed, the size-performance relationship has long been a major research topic both in industrial organization and in strategy. In the late 1960s, it has given rise to such famous strategy concepts as the so-called “experience curve”, but has since generated only limited interest. More recently, much research has been devoted to examining mergers and acquisitions on the one hand, and inter-firm alliances on the other hand. Both these moves significantly affect a firm's scale and are thus likely to have an impact on performance. However, the work on M&A or on alliances very rarely compares these different modes of growth to one another in their ability to deliver scale benefits. Our research specifically aims at analyzing the relative scale effects achieved when growing through either M&A or alliance, using organic growth as a baseline scenario. In this chapter we develop arguments on the relative impact of these two alternative modes of growth in terms of economies of scale, bargaining power, and overall performance effects. Our empirical analysis of the global retailing industry (through a sample of 82 firms observed between 1984 and early 2000s) reveals that M&A enhance bargaining power, while alliances fail to deliver the expected benefits.

This study investigates the effect of national champion strategies on the length of the pre-M&A process in Europe. The policy strategy of creating so-called “national champions,” that is, promoting national rather than international mergers, is often the focus of European policy debate. If European governments support national champion M&A activities, we would expect that national champion M&A deals have an accelerated pre-M&A process at the European Commission (EU) relative to comparable European M&A deals. To empirically test this proposition, we compare national champion M&A under scrutiny by the EU to similar deals in terms of industry and firm characteristics in the period 1997–2010. In contrast to our expectation, national champion M&As face a longer pre-M&A process than other comparable European M&As. However, evidence indicates that national champion M&As are almost always completed successfully while comparable European M&As are often derailed in process.

This chapter revisits central knowledge-based mechanisms that explain variance in value creation through mergers and acquisitions (M&As). It places the organizational capabilities of absorptive capacity and combinative capability in the context of M&As. Absorptive capacity – i.e., the combining firms’ ability to explore new knowledge – relies on the extent of prior related experiences of acquirers and their acquired firms, and available complementary knowledge among the two. Combinative capability – i.e., the combining firms’ ability to combine and recombine available existing knowledge – depends on the opportunity, motivation, and ability to share knowledge. The chapter concludes with several contextual factors that intensify the roles of knowledge, and reveal important contradictory roles in the development and value of absorptive capacity and combinative capability.

Following the cultural distance and the acquisition cultural risk propositions, I study the impact of organizational culture differences among merging companies on their short-term stock performance following merger announcement. I assume that on announcement the market cannot access companies’ organizational culture detailed information, that it focuses on its exposure risk, and that it is inefficient. Using public information available prior to merger announcement, I construct proxies of organizational culture differences among the merging companies and a proxy of a factor mitigating the acquisition cultural risk. Analyzing 6,742 merger announcements released by publicly traded U.S. companies between 1984 and 2005, I show that following merger announcement the market prices a factor mitigating the acquisition cultural risk rather than the magnitude of specific organizational culture differences. Moreover, the market prices stocks of companies involved in high-risk mergers lower than of companies in low-risk mergers. Results are robust to size and period controls.

Top managers rarely have an accurate inventory of the capabilities buried within their firms. Although there are many reasons for such partial knowledge, cognitive biases play an important role for its existence. We argue that managers’ cognitive biases could lead to lost opportunities and exposure to vulnerabilities as they engage in the complex cognitive tasks surrounding mergers and acquisitions. In this chapter, we propose a structured approach that managers can use to quickly assess the distribution of capabilities across merging firms to mitigate the impact of these biases. Strategic capability mapping (SCM) relies on an assessment of the distribution of capabilities, including where certain capabilities are located, their breadth and depth, and helps increase identification of potential complementarities and combination potential as well as reduce the merged firm's exposure to vulnerabilities such as losing areas of undiscovered strength. A description of the process and examples of successful application are provided.

Research on acquisition performance has not considered the customer perspective for a long time. Based on associative network theory, we propose two spillover effects – forward and reverse – to reflect the effect of acquirer and target reputation on customer responses toward a horizontal acquisition. The reputation of both the acquirer and target can transfer to acquisition and affect customer attitudes toward the post-merged corporation and target customer retentions. However, the influence of the acquirer reputation (forward spillover effect) is stronger than that of the target reputation (reverse spillover effect). Because of asymmetric spillover effects from the acquirer and target, we suggest that the performance effects of A acquiring B may not be the same as that of B acquiring A, given that A and B are highly related firms. The level of post-acquisition brand integration moderates the asymmetric spillover effect on acquisition performance. A higher level of post-acquisition brand integration indicates a stronger asymmetric spillover effect on acquisition performance.

We present an empirical investigation into how customers and competitors respond to merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, using data obtained from business-to-business customers of logistics industry acquisitions. We draw on the M&A and marketing literatures to develop a set of hypotheses about how customer loyalty may be affected by a supplier's involvement in an acquisition, including the influence of competitors reactions. Our data confirm that customers purchase behaviours can be affected by M&A activity, both positively and negatively, and we find support for a causal chain whereby post-acquisition integration actions cause changes in key customer relationship variables, which in turn drive changes in customer loyalty. Our results also provide empirical evidence of the significant role that competitors responses can play in reducing customer loyalty following an acquisition. We identify a number of factors that appear to influence the magnitude of competitors reactions, namely the scale and scope of the acquisition, the form of post-acquisition integration pursued and the ‘stickiness’ of existing customers. The implications of our findings for future research, as well as for executives engaged in M&A activity, are discussed.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) typically accelerate target top management team (TMT) executive departures. Market discipline and Relative Standing are two major and competing economic and sociological explanations for this phenomenon which lack a satisfactory theoretical integration. To fill this gap in the literature, we model the M&A market as a complex adaptive system composed of TMTs which rid themselves of executives via self-organized critical processes, generating M&A market-level properties that are emergent, or not easily explained with reference to the individual TMTs. The observation of an emergent power law distribution in target TMT executive retention rates for M&A activities in the United States supports our interpretation.

This chapter develops a decision-making framework to analyze important dimensions of mergers and acquisitions. Using a PLS approach, we show that strategic deals’ performance – measured by means of synergy realization, relative performance (compared to the competition), and absolute performance – is determined by three dimensions: strategic logic, organizational behavior, as well as finance. We find that the following significant variables, which stem from each of these dimensions, should be taken into account to ensure a successful deal: market similarities, market complementarities, operational similarities, operational complementarities, market power, purchasing power, acquisition experience, relative size, and due diligence.