高管从军经历对并购溢价的影响: 烙印——环境匹配的视角

Military experiences happened in a sensitive period will profoundly affect entrepreneurs’ value systems and decision-making preferences. To shed light on the prominent M&A premium phenomenon in the Chinese market, this paper based on the imprinting theory and the upper echelons theory and taking Shenzhen and Shanghai A-share listed firms’ M&A events from 2010 to 2017 as the research sample, empirically investigates the effect of entrepreneurs’ military experiences on M&A premiums and its mechanism from the perspective of imprint-environment fit, focusing on the impact of the stimulation and manifestation of military imprints on entrepreneurs’ decision-making in different situations. According to the research, we find that entrepreneurs with military experiences have more pronounced tendency to pay higher M&A premiums in M&A activities, due to the characteristics of high confidence and high execution ability formed by military imprints. Furthermore, we find that the degree of industry competition as an important situation will have a profound effect on the degree of matching between the M&A decision-making context and the initial environment when military imprints was formed. Therefore, it plays a positive moderating role between entrepreneurs’ military experiences and M&A premium. Specifically, the higher the level of industry competition, the stronger the positive effect of entrepreneurs’ military experience on M&A premium. Our research contributes to reveal the special effect of military entrepreneurs on the M&A decision-making. On the basis of expending the application scope of the imprinting theory, this paper further enriches the research content of situational factors of M&A premium. Our results also provide new theoretical inspiration for improving the decision-making quality of entrepreneurs and perfecting M&A strategies.