This paper investigates whether acquisitions involving public high technology firms are best understood in terms of acquirers taking over firms with ‘superior' innovation performance to access their assets, or acquiring firms with ‘inferior' innovation performance to turn them around....

This paper presents a nonparametric method for calculating a lower bound on the virtual or reservation price of a new good. This allows the welfare effects of product market innovations to be investigated. We illustrate the technique using consumer panel data.