We can look at the pricing of an IPO as just the single transaction. Those selling – which includes earlier investors and possibly the company itself – would like to gain the maximum price for what they’re selling. Those who continue to hold from that group would like to maximise the price over time of course, not just at that one instant of the IPO.
However, this all gets rather more complicated when we realise that the system itself isn’t so much interested in the one transaction but rather in the success of the system. We thus enter rather more complicated economics:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]This is where we get to the double sided market thing, the study of which gained Jean Tirole his Nobel. The archetype is the newspaper. It’s selling journalism to the readers and at the same time selling the readers’ attention to the advertisers. Google sells us search, it sells our eyeballs to advertisers. Facebook and so on – all double sided markets. So too the IPO process. The market as a whole is selling investment opportunities to investors and yet also investor’s money to those selling investment opportunities. There are two sets of customers here and it’s unlikely that both sides are going to be entirely happy about any one deal.[/perfectpullquote] [perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Add onto that the principal/agent problem. The sellers of the stock into the IPO are very interested indeed at the price their specific deal gets. Their agents, the IPO market participants, are much more interested in the idea that the transaction goes ahead and that the pipeline of transactions continues than they are in the specific price of one particular deal. A nice empirical proof of this was the chapter about realtors in Freakonomics. When they’re selling their own properties they achieve rather higher prices than when they sell seemingly equivalent properties for customers. They also take rather longer to sell in order to gain that price. This is the difference between their operating as principals instead of agents. [/perfectpullquote]Predicting how the IPO price of Uber will be influenced by the immediately previous series of IPOs is thus difficult.
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Re: the reference to Freakonomics, I found this part of the book very weak. What they claim to have found is that realtors get more money when they sell their own homes than non-realtors do. The author attributed this to the idea that a realtor wants to sell your home quickly more than get the highest possible price so that they can move on and sell the next one - i.e., their interests aren't aligned with yours. The finding re price may be correct, but there are a number of possible reasons:
I've sold 3 houses so far, and in 2 of the 3 the realtor had almost nothing to do with setting the asking price or deciding whether we accepted the offers. In the 3rd case, the realtor talked us into raising the asking price.
Realtors are probably much more rational about their pricing, more patient, have a better understanding of the market and stage their homes better. That a realtor would get more selling a house that he/she owns than a non-realtor strikes me as expected, motivation aside. Also, note that if you sell your house for 5% more their commission is 5% higher, so the idea that they'd encourage you to sell low is questionable.