Putting Directors’ Money Where Their Mouths Are

I put forward a new arrangement to protect shareholders from underpriced bids in takeover situations. Target boards, as stewards of the corporation who typically possess superior information about the desirability of unsolicited bids, could be expected to protect their shareholders from such bids. Unfortunately, because they have a conflict of interest with their shareholders in takeover situations, they tend to reject hostile bids to an excessive degree. Moreover, the current Delaware doctrine is ineffective in monitoring boards’ responses to takeovers, largely because boards might use selective inside information to which the courts lack access and because their judgments are backed by subjective, hard-to-attack legal and financial expert opinions that courts are ill-equipped to challenge.