• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.97-113
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• 2014

Circular shareholding refers to a situation where at least three member firms in a business group have stock in other member firms and establish a series of ownership in a circular way. Although many studies have focused on the ultimate effect of circular shareholding on firm's value and profitability, there have been few studies which address how to resolve circular shareholding from the perspective of optimization theory. This paper proposes a heuristic method for identifying shareholdings which need to be cleared in order to settle the problem of circular shareholding in a business group. The proposed heuristic tries to maximize the sum of voting rights the controlling family has in its business group firms. The applications results confirm that the heuristic provides near-optimal solutions for most of 16 Korean large business groups involving circular shareholding.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.65-78
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• 2013

Circular shareholding is established when at least three member firms in a business group hold stock in other member firms and form a series of ownership in a circular way. Although there have been many studies which investigated a negative effect of circular shareholding on firm's value, few studies have discussed how to resolve the problem given complicated ownership structures of large business groups. This paper is based on a mixed integer programming model, which was proposed in the author's previous research and can identify the ownership share divested in order to resolve circular shareholding. Since the optimization model becomes too complicated for large business groups and requires a sophisticated software to solve it, we propose a simple heuristic method that can find a good approximate solution to the model. Its applications to twelve Korean large business groups show that the heuristic method is not just computationally attractive but also provides near-optimal solutions in most cases.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.73-89
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• 2009

Circular shareholdings among three companies are formed when company A owns stock in company B, company B owns stock in company C, and company C owns stock in company A. Since circular shareholdings among large family-controlled firms are used to give the controlling shareholder greater control or more opportunities to expropriate minority investors, the government has encouraged large business groups to gradually remove their circular shareholdings. In this paper, we propose a combinatorial optimization model that can answer the question, which equity investments among complicated investment relationships of one large business group should be removed to resolve its circular shareholdings. To the best knowledge of the authors, our research is the first one that has approached the circular shareholding problem in respect of management science. The proposed combinatorial optimization model are formulated into integer programming problem and applied to some Korean major business groups.