DaimlerChrysler may demerge. Back in the days when I did this kind of research, we often found that 60-70% of mergers destroyed value for the acquiring shareholders. The most typical problems were a failure to manage massive integration issues and, of course, over-paying for the acquisition. Along with over-paying, one can suggest a failure to let go of the acquisition if things aren’t going well, and I’ve personally wondered whether corporate entities do have an equivalent of human loss-aversion - the tendency in stock markets to hold onto losers and sell winners.
As far as managing integration goes, I think a common failure is a bias in the forecast of conjunctive events. That iis events (such as the success of a merger integration) that depend on a number of individual events ocurring. Even if if individual event is likely to ocurr, the probability of failure can be quite high if there are a large number of events. Thus, in mergers, executives do not forsee the immense number of tasks that must be done, or focus only on a few salient issues (such as IT integration, which they might manage) and fail in the rest.
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