An Explanation of the Nature of Internally Generated Goodwill Based on Aggregation of Interacting Assets

Increasing internally generated goodwill (IGG) is another way of depicting the rising gap between market and accounting values sometimes referred as the “book-to-market black box”. Existing methods propose to value internally generated goodwill as the present value of abnormal earnings (e.g., residual income models) or to measure it indirectly through the excess of the enterprise value over the fair value of assets in a business combination. The critical drawback of these approaches is that they do not explain how the goodwill is created. In other words they do not enter into the “black box”. We propose an alternative valuation method based on the recognition that using an asset in combination with other assets leads to an interaction affecting firm value. In this context IGG emerges from an inadequate theory of aggregation of assets. Using Choquet’s capacities, which are non-additive aggregation operators, allows solving this adequacy issue as IGG arises as a consequence of specific synergies between assets. Our model is tested on the U.S. High Technology sector and benchmarked against the residual income model. To the extent of the accuracy to forecast enterprise value, our model performs better than the standard residual income model.