Finance and management buyouts: Agency versus entrepreneurship perspectives

Agency theory, the predominant theoretical lens employed to examine leveraged buyouts, focuses on buyouts principally as a governance and control device. This view is especially useful in evaluating mature firms where discipline, incentives and limits to managerial discretion serve to mitigate the destruction or the downside of firm value. In contrast, an entrepreneurial view of buyouts is introduced, which incorporates upside incentives for growth and improvements not associated with pure efficiency gains or more effective monitoring to curtail opportunism. Investors such as venture capitalists in the UK and LBO associations in the US are increasingly investing in buyouts to realize entrepreneurial opportunities. Understanding how entrepreneurs make decisions with greater reliance on cognitive biases and heuristics provides an insightful lens for understanding why different types of buyouts occur. These perspectives provide a view of buyouts as a vehicle for strategic innovation and renewal that fosters upside growth opportunities in a variety of buyout types which heretofore have not been incorporated into buyout theory. Finally, research issues are discussed to facilitate future conceptual development and empirical testing of the upside as well as the downside of buyouts.