Heterogeneity and Strategic Choices: The Case of Stock Repurchases

Anup Menon Nandialath
Bernardo da Veiga

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

SSRN Electronic Journal

Publication Date

1-1-2010

Abstract

Strategic decisions are fundamentally tough choices. Theory suggests that managers are likely to display bounded rationality. Empirics on the other hand assume rationality in choice behavior. Recognizing this inherent disconnect between theory and empirics, we try to account for behavioral biases using a theoretically consistent choice model. The traditional approach to modeling strategic choice has been to use discrete choice models and make inference on the conditional mean effects. We argue that the conditional mean effect does not capture behavioral biases. The focus should be on the conditional variance. Explicitly modeling the conditional variance (in the discrete choice framework) provides us with valuable information on individual level variation in decision-making. We demonstrate the effect of ignoring the role of variance in choice modeling in the context of firm’s decisions to conduct open market repurchases. We show that when taking into account the heterogeneity in choices, manager’s choices of conducting open market repurchases displays considerable heterogeneity and that not accounting for such heterogeneity might lead to wrong conclusions on the mean effects.

ISSN

1556-5068

Publisher

Elsevier BV

Disciplines

Business

Indexed in Scopus

no

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Green: A manuscript of this publication is openly available in a repository

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