• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
• /
• v.12 no.2
• /
• pp.95-120
• /
• 1990

The underpricing of new shares of a firm that are offered to the public for the first time (initial offerings) is well known and has puzzled financial economists for a long time since it seems at odds with the optimal behavior of the owners of issuing firms. Past attempts by financial economists to explain this phenomenon have not been successful in the sense that the explanations given by them are either inconsistent with the equilibrium theory or implausible. Approaches by such authors as Welch or Allen and Faulhaber are no exceptions. In this paper, we develop a signalling model of capital investment to explain the underpricing phenomenon and also analyze the efficiency of investment. The model focuses on the information asymmetry between the owners of issuing firms and general investors. We consider a firm that has been owned and operated by a single owner and that has a profitable project but has no capital to develop it. The profit from the project depends on the capital invested in the project as well as a profitability parameter. The model also assumes that the financial market is represented by a single investor who maximizes the expected wealth. The owner has superior information as to the value of the firm to investors in the sense that it knows the true value of the parameter while investors have only a probability distribution about the parameter. The owner offers the representative investor a fraction of the ownership of the firm in return for a certain amount of investment in the firm. This offer condition is equivalent to the usual offer condition consisting of the number of issues to sell and the unit price of a share. Thus, the model is a signalling game. Using Kreps' criterion as the solution concept, we obtained an essentially unique separating equilibrium offer condition. Analysis of this separating equilibrium shows that the owner of the firm with high profitability chooses an offer condition that raises an amount of capital that is short of the amount that maximizes the potential profit from the project. It also reveals that the fraction of the ownership of the firm that the representative investor receives from the owner of the highly profitable firm in return for its investment has a value that exceeds the investment. In other words, the initial offering in the model is underpriced when the profitability of the firm is high. The source of underpricing and underinvestment is the signalling activity by the owner of the highly profitable firm who attempts to convince investors that his firm has a highly profitable project by choosing an offer condition that cannot be imitated by the owner of a firm with low profitability. Thus, we obtained two main results. First, underpricing is a result of a signalling activity by the owner of a firm with high profitability when there exists information asymmetry between the owner of the issuing firm and investors. Second, such information asymmetry also leads to underinvestment in a highly profitable project. Those results clearly show the underpricing entails underinvestment and that information asymmetry leads to a social cost as well as a private cost. The above results are quite general in the sense that they are based upon a neoclassical profit function and full rationality of economic agents. We believe that the results of this paper can be used as a basis for further research on the capital investment process. For instance, one can view the results of this paper as a subgame equilibrium in a larger game in which a firm chooses among diverse ways to raise capital. In addition, the method used in this paper can be used in analyzing a wide range of problems arising from information asymmetry that the Korean financial market faces.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
• /
• v.23 no.4
• /
• pp.121-129
• /
• 2014

The importance of evaluation of farming performance has been increasing with the progress of farm size and capitalization, and with the introduction of the concept of the 6th industry to agriculture. In this research, ROIC(Return on Invested Capital) tree technique was examined as a new method for analyzing operations performance of supply chain for farm produce. Current practices of production and distribution of blueberry, model crop, were investigated and ROIC tree for blueberry has been set up from the survey of the supply chain. Then, it was simulated with real values collected from the participants in the supply chain and the previous studies using a spreadsheet program. The resulting ROIC value was compared with those of other industries and the conventional performance analysis method. Features of the evaluation technique were identified and it was proposed how to apply it to agricultural field in the future.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.18 no.9
• /
• pp.584-593
• /
• 2018

The startup, which is a common noun to start a small business, has been recently one of main targets for policymakers due to its important role for job creation and considerable potential for sustainability of an economy. However, technological entrepreneurship decreased by 5.0% p from 2013 to 2016. The revitalization of entrepreneurial investment promoted by the government is mainly supported in fruitable venture companies at grow stage or 2~3 years before IPO through venture capital firms and angel funds. It is far from an investment at start-up. It is therefore necessary to motivate private investment to be active in the private start-up sector. In addition, the start-up investment requires institutional support and government support to meet the expectations of investors about the possibility of payback and profitability of private investment invested in the founding period. As a small entrepreneur at a comparably early stage in the lifecycle of business, investments for the startup are generally made by informal investors such as family, friends and fools, and their decision making processes are relatively non-programmed compared with ones for listed corporales such as venture capital and angel fund agency. This study focuses on analyzing decision making factors in investment, and verifying an impact of such factors, specifically the possibility of investment payback and investment profitability, in a decision-making process for the startup especially at the very early stage.