IPO Pricing Strategies with Deadweight and Search Costs

Su Han Chan (), Ko Wang () and Jing Yang ()
Additional contact information
Su Han Chan: Baruch College/CUNY
Jing Yang: California State University - Fullerton

Journal of Real Estate Research, 2009, vol. 31, issue 4, 481-542

Abstract: This paper builds a model to provide a complementary explanation to the well-known IPO pricing puzzle. Unlike existing theories in the field, our model does not assume that one agent (issuer, underwriter, informed investor, or uninformed investor) has superior information over another, nor that the pricing (or allocation) process is a tool for extracting information from the agent with superior information. We also pay no attention to the interactions between issuers and underwriters or to the investor sentiment (or underwriter activities) in the aftermarket. Instead, we allow the investor to make a decision on whether and when she should gather information (at a cost), and allow her to make a purchase decision based on the information she has gathered. With this investor's decision-making process in mind, firms price their IPOs to maximize their payoffs by trying to avoid an IPO failure (which is assumed to be costly to the firm) and by assessing the investor's possible post-search outcomes. While our model provides implications to the general IPO puzzle, the results seem particularly relevant for explaining the pricing of Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) IPOs, Master Limited Partnership (MLP) IPOs, and mutual fund IPOs (for which the current theories fail to provide an adequate explanation). Our model may also help explain why IPO underpricing levels change over time and suggest that underpricing levels might vary across industries.

JEL-codes: L85 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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