Acquisitions, what will happen to my business? Predicting the acquired firm status

Mergers and acquisitions are of great practical importance in strategic, monetary, and social terms. They have attracted the research attention of several management disciplines. However, no studies have used prediction techniques for analyzing these challenging and high risk activities, particularly if we consider the viewpoint of the acquired firm. Guided by the firms’ needs on a support to their strategic decisions, we analyzed the stability of the acquired firm’s status. With the aim of predicting the evolution of these cooperative arrangements, we carried out an empirical study meant to verify the ability of some Machine Learning techniques to predict the acquired firm’s status after two years from the acquisitions. In our analysis we employed 107 firms that were involved in acquisition, and applied a 10-fold cross validation. The preliminary results suggest that two of the employed techniques can be profitably exploited to provide accurate estimates of the acquired firm’s status.