Contract Choice and Pricing of IPOs

This paper proposes a pricing model for IPOs which can reconcile the average underpricing phenomenon with the expected wealth maximizing behaviors of market participants. Under the usual informational asymmetry, the optimal offer price for best efforts IPOs is derived as a function of the uncertainty about market's valuation, the expected return on proposed projects and the size of offerings relative to the firm's market value. Depending on these firm-specific characteristics, best efforts IPOs can be underpriced, fairly priced, or overpriced. Introducing the investment banker as an outside information producer, the model is extended to provide empirical implications for pricing and underwriting contract choice decisions which are consistent with the existing empirical evidences. The model predicts that the issuers with greater uncertainty about market's valuation choose best efforts contract over firm commitment contract and the dispersion of initial returns would be greater for best efforts IPOs than for firm commitment IPOs.