Abstract: We bring a social network perspective to a topic of great current interest to international business scholars: cross-border acquisitions by emerging market enterprises. Professional advisors, e.g., investment bankers, often guide buyers through the deal process, not only providing skilled advice, but also leveraging their network connections to facilitate the deal. Thus, we ask if the advisor’s network position helps make the deal more successful. We theorize a paradoxical network effect: While advisor centrality and advisor brokerage help complete deals, they also make the deal duration longer. A dataset of outbound acquisitions from China and India is supportive of our hypotheses.

About Speaker: Sathyajit Gubbi is currently a tenured Associate Professor of International Business and Strategy at the Faculty of Economics and Business (EQUIS and AACSB accredited), University of Groningen, Netherlands—ranked among the top 100 globally as per different ranking metrics.

Sathyajit is a Fulbright scholar and completed his doctoral degree in strategic management from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. His doctoral dissertation and current research focuses on corporate and competitive strategy in the context of emerging markets, with an emphasis on strategic behavior of multinational firms originating in emerging/developing economies. Sathyajit’s research has been published in several top international journals such as Organization Science, Journal of International Business Studies, Long Range Planning, and Management International Review and more papers are currently under review.

As a doctoral student, Sathyajit was one of the first from India to publish in the Journal of International Business Studies and has won several awards including the first Pradip N Khandwalla Award at IMR doctoral conference in 2009 at IIM Bangalore.

Sathyajit also holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Prior to joining academia, Sathyajit worked for over a decade with multinational engineering design and consultancy firms in India, China and United States.