Who buys whom: information environments and organizational boundary spanning through acquisitions

Companies extend their boundaries through acquisitions to new industries, product lines, technologies, markets and geographic locations. Diversification research has focused predominantly on boundary extensions across industries. Using data on 167 intra-industry acquisitions in the pharmaceuticals industry between 1991 and 1996, we study boundary extension in an industry, integrating existing arguments to examine how proximity in intraindustry networks, geographic location, and technological domain influences the likelihood of acquisition. As expected, the proximity of two firms in these search contexts increases the likelihood that one will acquire the other, but the contexts are partial substitutes, proximity in one search context overcoming distance in other contexts.Thus, we find that while pharmaceutical companies are more likely to acquire technologically similar foreign companies, they are more likely to acquire technologically dissimilar alliance partners. Our results contribute to an improved understanding of who buys whom and in doing so, organizational boundary spanning through acquisitions.