Читать книгу Applied Mergers and Acquisitions - Robert F. Bruner - Страница 25

Ethical behavior builds trust; trust rewards. The branding of products seeks to create a bond between producer and consumer: a signal of purity, performance, or other attributes of quality. This bond is built by trustworthy behavior. As markets reveal, successfully branded products command a premium price. Bonds of trust tend to pay. If the field of M&A were purely a world of one-off transactions, it would seem ripe for opportunistic behavior. But in the case of repeated entry into M&A, for instance by active buyers, intermediaries, and advisers, reputation can count for a great deal in shaping the expectations of counterparties. This implicit bond, trust, or reputation can translate into more effective and economically attractive mergers and acquisitions.

The objection to this line of reasoning is that ethical behavior should be an end in itself. If you are behaving ethically only to get rich, then you are hardly committed to that behavior; being ethical for pay is inauthentic. This is true. But it is a useful encouragement to all of us that ethical behavior need not entail pure sacrifice. Some might even see this as an imperfect means by which justice expresses itself.