The Role of Relatedness between Target and Acquirer: A Machine Learning approach
Although the idea of the significance of the distinctiveness of business relationships in creating merger synergies is theoretically appealing, there is limited empirical evidence to support this concept. In our study we investigate the uniqueness of the acquirer-target relationship. We use the machine learning tool Glasso to measure the conditional dependence between acquirer and target. Another measure of our research is the product relatedness. Finally, we analyze the post-merger performance in merger synergies.

