---
title: "Modeling Contagious Merger and Acquisition via Point Processes with a Profile Regression Prior"
authors:
  - "Junchi Yan"
  - "Shuai Xiao"
  - "Changsheng Li"
  - "Bo Jin"
  - "Xiangfeng Wang"
  - "Bin Ke"
  - "Xiaokang Yang"
  - "Hongyuan Zha"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/382"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/0382.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2016
pages: "2690-2695"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Modeling Contagious Merger and Acquisition via Point Processes with a Profile Regression Prior

Junchi Yan, Shuai Xiao, Changsheng Li, Bo Jin, Xiangfeng Wang, Bin Ke, Xiaokang Yang, Hongyuan Zha

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 2690-2695.

## Abstract

Merger and Acquisition (M&A) has been a critical practice about corporate restructuring. Previous studies are mostly devoted to evaluating the suitability of M&A between a pair of investor and target company, or a target company for its propensity of being acquired. This paper focuses on the dual problem of predicting an investor's prospective M&A based on its activities and firmographics. We propose to use a mutually-exciting point process with a regression prior to quantify the investor's M&A behavior. Our model is motivated by the so-called contagious 'wave-like' M&A phenomenon, which has been well-recognized by the economics and management communities. A tailored model learning algorithm is devised that incorporates both static profile covariates and past M&A activities. Results on CrunchBase suggest the superiority of our model. The collected dataset and code will be released together with the paper.