Managerial bias supports market wave formation: Evidence with logical formalization

When?

Wednesday 4 May 2011, 14:00 to 15:00

Where?

01MS03

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Abstract

Imitation of first-mover firms that opt for merger/acquisition (M&A) facilitates merger-wave formation. Empirical evidence suggests that firms tend to regret more not following their rivals’ M&A strategy than possibly failing jointly by copying it. We explore this decision-making context by setting up a model in symbolic logic. Biased expectations, represented by applying the B (belief) operator, filter out relevant scenarios from managerial consideration so that they would incline imitating first-mover M&As, even when unbiased perception would suggest staying idle.
The presentation also introduces the basics of logical formalization, a flexible qualitative model-building method for social scientists that supports deriving conclusions from natural language premises with rigor and transparency.

Speaker

Dr Gábor Péli

Gábor Péli is an Associate Professor at Utrecht University, School of Economics, and a part-time researcher at the Antwerp Centre of Evolutionary Demography (ACED). His main domain of research is organisation theory, with special attention to mathematical formal logical modelling of organisational phenomena.