Beware the Winner's Curse
Victories that Can Sink You and Your Company
- Editore:
Oxford University Press Inc
- EAN:
9780195177404
- ISBN:
0195177401
- Pagine:
- 256
- Formato:
- Hardback
- Lingua:
- Inglese
Descrizione Beware the Winner's Curse
In the roaring 1990s, many companies seemed to claim great victories-acquiring another company, obtaining state-of-the art technology, or hiring a potential CEO savior-only to find that they had made a great mistake. The term "Winner's Curse" was coined by economists to explain an effectcommonly observed in auctions. In such situations, since the winning bidder is usually the most optimistic about the value of the item being auctioned, there is a very good chance that the bid will be more (sometimes much more) than the item is worth. So a company that overvalues a good orservice, or bids higher than its value has the potential of experiencing this Winner's Curse. In this book, G. Anandalingam and Henry C. Lucas, Jr. expand the model of the Winner's Curse to explain how companies like Tyco, MCI-WorldCom and Bank One overpaid for acquisitions, and how shareholders suffered as a result. They elucidate the disasters that happened during the rush to acquire newtechnologies and illuminate the reasons that companies that were seemingly pioneers in the dot-com era fell by the wayside. Beginning by exploring the psychological, personal and market factors that can encourage a decision maker to overvalue an asset and experience the Winner's Curse, the bookgoes on to examine several case studies, including the disastrous wireless spectrum auctions that have devastated the telecommunications industry, and the dot-com bust. It concludes by discussing ways to avoid the Winner's Curse, calling for major changes in the behavior of CEOs and members ofboars of directors, as well as the use of powerful techniques for analyzing decisions, including a systems approach to decisionmaking, scenario analysis and game theory.
