Designing optimal M&A strategies under uncertainty

The recent surge in M&A activities highlights firms’ motivation to gain or maintain market leadership. Along with the unparalleled volume of M&As, more and more firms favor establishing acquisition programs that lead to multiple subsequent M&As over time. In this paper, we study the entrance in a market by means of M&A when different strategies to acquire a prominent incumbent are available to the acquirer. In particular, the firm might opt for a big leap, where it acquires the prominent incumbent; the alternative is to design an acquisition program that allows moving in small steps by acquiring a minor company first and the larger prominent player later on. We employ a dynamic game-theoretic real options model to investigate the effect of uncertainty and synergies on the strategy choices and also consider alternative contract designs for the acquisition program, such as hostile, friendly or mixed. Our findings reveal that firms prefer acquisition programs to big leap strategies when the industry exhibits high levels of uncertainty and can occur even when the acquisition of the first target destroys value. Moreover, some acquisition programs profit from a first-mover pass-through where the acquirer can jointly utilize his first-mover advantage when negotiating with multiple targets. Finally, novel testable hypotheses are derived from the model.