Technology Relatedness and M&A Performance：A Perspective of Property Rights

Abstract

According to the property rights theory M&A are undoubtedly important for companies As companies actively engage in M&A activities to rapidly acquire key external technological resources they often ignore the facts that M&A may bring the negative effects to the companies This arouses an issue about the relationships between technology relatedness and M&A performance However this issue remains controversy to date and there is no systematically research Here we use the property rights theory to find out the relationships between technology relatedness and M&A performance; furthermore it has incorporated the moderator’s effect on organizations’ internal absorptive capacity This research uses SDC database to find out the M&A cases in Taiwan between 2005 and 2015 then uses International Patent Classification (IPC) as a measure of technology relatedness indicator The research results indicated the following: an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between technology similarity and market performance; technology complementary and market performance are positively correlated; and technology diversity and market performance are negative correlated Finally an organization’s absorptive capacity positively affects the relationship between technology relatedness and market performance Thus such a phenomenon can act as a reference for businesses in M&A decision making

Date of Award	2016 Aug 19
Original language	English
Supervisor	Shih-Chieh Fang (Supervisor)