Wolf Pack Activism

Alon Brav, Amil Dasgupta, Richmond Mathews

Series number :

Serial Number:

501/2017

Date posted :

April 01 2017

Last revised :

April 05 2018

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Keywords

Corporate governance; blockholder monitoring; institutional investors; reputation concerns; strategic complementarity

Blockholder monitoring is key to corporate governance, but blockholders large enough to exercise signi cant unilateral in uence are rare. Mechanisms that enable small blockholders to exert collective in uence are therefore important. We present a model in which one or more sizeable lead activists implicitly coor- dinate with many smaller followers in engaging target management.

Our model formalizes a key source of complementarity across the engagement strategies of institutional blockholders, arising from their motivation to attract investment ows, which overcomes free riding even for small blockholders and enables coordinated engagement. We also characterize how wolf packs form.

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