Acquisitions: Paintings

Looking Through Paintings

Protein structure paintings.

When artist Steve Miller met Nobel Laureate Rod MacKinnon at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, MacKinnon was investigating protein structures: specifically, how potassium ions move across cell membranes. Miller became fascinated with the visual tools MacKinnon used to grapple with the problem: 3D computer models of proteins, graphical equations and diagrams in the scientist’s notebook...

Distinguishing paintings from photographs

We addressed the problem of automatically differentiating photographs of real scenes from photographs of paintings. We found that photographs differ from paintings in their color, edge, and texture properties. Based on these features, we trained and tested a classifier on a database of 6000 paintings and 6000 photographs. Using single features results in 70–80% correct discrimination performanc...

Killer Acquisitions ∗

This article demonstrates that incumbent firms acquire innovative targets to discontinue the development of the targets’ innovation projects in order to preempt future competition. We call such acquisitions “killer acquisitions.” We illustrate the phenomenon using a model with product market competition, innovation, and endogenous acquisition decisions. In our model incumbent firms have incenti...

Homebiased Acquisitions

We show that CEOs exhibit a home bias in acquisitions. Firms are over twice as likely to acquire targets located in their CEOs’ home states than similar targets domiciled elsewhere. The bias is strongest for private targets and when acquirer governance is lax, and these private home deals do not create value, suggesting that CEOs acquire these targets for their own benefits. Unlike typical publ...