Takeover auctions with actively participating targets

This paper provides an analysis of takeover auctions in which target firms actively participate by changing their reserve prices. It considers a takeover auction as an affiliated value English auction with flexible reserve price and discusses how the degree of value affiliation affects the bidding strategies and the degree of competition in takeover auctions. It makes comparative analysis of three different designs of English auctions and shows that a takeover auction is dominated by one of the English auctions with fixed reserve price.