Shaking hands with common foes: Clique premium and information diffusion in private equity networks

The fastest growing segment of private equity deals is secondary buyouts (SBOs) sales from one private equity (PE) firm to another. We operationalize a novel FactSet database to map the network structures of secondary buyouts between PE firms. We offer three contributions. First, after controlling for economic covariates, we find that PE firms are almost three times more likely to transact if they share a partner, that is both firms belong to the same clique. Second, we find that the profitability of such transactions is unambiguously higher relative to the baseline only if these are the result of repeated interaction between firms belonging to the same cliques. In other words, a clique premium exists under repeated interaction. Third, we provide evidence that the economic incentive at the core of clique premium may be related to access to information. In fact, we show that information related to transactions diffuses through the network, with 23% and 16% of the information going one and two steps beyond transacting parties, respectively.