The Diagnostic Value and Anchoring Effect of References in Acquisition Premium Decisions: The Influence of Overconfident and Powerful CEOs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract CEOs often must make strategic decisions under extreme uncertainty. One way they deal with this uncertainty is by relying on references – that is, recent comparable decisions. However, there is a conundrum that underlies these references: they can have diagnostic value but also induce anchoring. We shed light on this conundrum by unpacking diagnostic value and anchoring effects of two commonly used references in acquisition premium decisions: an external reference (the premium paid for the preceding acquisition in the target industry) and an internal reference (the premium paid by a focal firm for its preceding acquisition). We theorize that while external references have diagnostic value and anchoring effects, internal references only have anchoring effects. Moreover, we argue that powerful and overconfident CEOs rely more on internal references. Our results, based on a hedonic regression analysis of 3072 completed acquisitions, support these hypotheses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".