Author: Aishwarya Ray
Co-Advisor: Dr. Suman Banerjee
Co-Advisor: Dr. Emmanuel Hatzakis
Date: May 10, 2021
Department: School of Business
Degree: Master of Science- Financial Engineering
ABSTRACT
In this thesis, we develop a simple model to explore the likelihood of a prof itable acquisition in a standard oligopolistic market framework. We show that with out costs synergy any acquisition is unprofitable. Next, we derive the bonds of costs synergy between two firms that facilitate a profitable acquisition. Further, we allow cross-cross-equity positions between firms and show that cross-equity positions among f irms in the industry facilitate profitable acquisitions. The intuition is quite straight forward: increased industry concentration helps every firm in the industry other than the acquiring firm. If the acquiring firm holds cross equity positions, then the acquir ing firm benefits from the increased valuation of the existing firms in the industry. Furthermore, our results are based on the fundamental conditions that eliminate “the merger paradox” and “the insiders’ dilemma”- results that have made it difficult to justify horizontal mergers in a linear, homogeneous, symmetric Cournot market in the existing literature.
Keywords: Cournot Game Market , Merger, Acquisition, Costs Synergy, Cross-Equity Position, Cross-Holding, Toehold.