The Journal of Finance

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

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IPO Pricing and Share Allocation: The Importance of Being Ignorant

Published: 01/10/2008   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2008.01321.x

CÉLINE GONDAT‐LARRALDE, KEVIN R. JAMES

Since an underwriter sets an IPO's offer price without knowing its market value, investors can acquire information about its value and avoid overpriced deals (“lemon‐dodge”). To mitigate this well‐known risk, the bank enters into a repeat game with a coalition of investors who do not lemon‐dodge in exchange for on‐average underpriced shares. We (i) derive and test a quantitative IPO pricing rule (showing that tech IPOs were not excessively underpriced during the boom of the 1990s); and (ii) analyzing a unique multibank data set, find strong support for the conjecture that a bank preferentially allocates shares to its coalition.