Strategic and Financial Bidders in Takeover Auctions

Using data on auctions of companies, we estimate valuations (maximum willingness to pay) of strategic and financial bidders from their bids. We find that a typical target is valued higher by strategic bidders. However, 22.4% of targets in our sample are valued higher by financial bidders. These are...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gorbenko, Alexander S., Malenko, Andrey
Other Authors: Sloan School of Management
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Finance Association/Wiley 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/98906
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6429-850X
Description
Summary:Using data on auctions of companies, we estimate valuations (maximum willingness to pay) of strategic and financial bidders from their bids. We find that a typical target is valued higher by strategic bidders. However, 22.4% of targets in our sample are valued higher by financial bidders. These are mature, poorly performing companies. We also find that (i) valuations of different strategic bidders are more dispersed and (ii) valuations of financial bidders are correlated with aggregate economic conditions. Our results suggest that different targets appeal to different types of bidders, rather than that strategic bidders always value targets more because of synergies.