Greetings from Florian Ederer!

Greetings from Florian Ederer!

Greetings from my home office which currently serves the dual role of research center and teaching hub!

Yale University moved to remote teaching in early March and I have since been teaching my elective course in Competitive Strategy from the confines of my own home. Because my teaching of 3 consecutive sessions of a total of 200 MBA students via Zoom is a rather noisy affair, I have also foreclosed my spouse’s workspace and displaced her to a different part of the house. Unfortunately for me, our 2 children who are at home with us have contested ownership of some of the critical assets, such as the whiteboard, and have established a market-controlling position over the whiteboard markers.

Together with my fabulous co-authors Colleen Cunningham and Song Ma I am also putting the final touches on the revision of our paper on “Killer Acquisitions” (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3241707). We hope that one positive side effect of social distancing is the elimination of distractions which will give us one last push to resubmit the paper to the editor and referees within the next month.

My co-authors and I didn’t think that with the challenges posed by COVID-19 anybody would really care about our research about killer acquisitions right now. But the pandemic highlighted Covidien’s 2012 acquisition of the ventilator manufacturer Newport. This may have prevented Newport from building a cheaper ventilator that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business (https://globalcompetitionreview.com/article/usa/1222543/ventilator-merger-scrutinised-as-potential-%E2%80%9Ckiller-acquisition%E2%80%9D).

I urge you all to stay at home and hope to see you all in person soon!

Stay healthy,
Florian


Florian Ederer is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management, an affiliated faculty member of the Yale Department of Economics, and a research staff member of the Cowles Foundation.

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