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The general current of feeling of the meeting as reflected both in the papers and in the discussion is that the standard of indexing is not nearly adequate. This feeling has been shown both in direct comments, and by implication in some pleas for minor improvements that could only have been put forward in a world of very imperfect indexes.

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Management buyout (MBO) is a specialized form of acquisition with different motives. Sometimes, there are initiatives taken by the senior management to bailout the firm from sickness. The predominant agency theory focuses only on the governance issues in the MBO firms and this theory can be applied to understand how managerial discretion can play vital roles in mitigating value destruction in the post-MBO firm. A CEO-led MBO is presumed to be greed-driven (Bebchuk, L., Cremers, M., & Peyer, U. (2011). The CEO pay slice. Journal of Financial Economics, 102, 199–221.). But a senior management team-led MBO is said to be a socialistic move. By default, MBOs are debt-driven, unless the buying management team is financially affluent, which may be rare, considering the price for the buyout. Private equity (PE) players play a dominant role in providing and or arranging funds in the form of equity and or debt. There is a notion that the PE investors help promote entrepreneurial and modern management practices. The MBO target firm has to ensure returning the entire money back to the sponsors within the shortest possible time out of the operational cash flow. Therefore, various issues like identifying a target firm, sourcing mix of finance, MBO price determination, value creation and value delivery to all stakeholders are all important for understanding the subject. This chapter attempts to construct a robust model for structuring MBO to ensure value fairness to all parties involved in the transaction.

Employee Stock Options are the most widely used incentive compensation tool, and prior research has shown their advantages. However, research among different peer groups, different time frames, different research methodologies, and the constantly changing public opinion prevents unanimous agreements on the various benefits of Employee Stock Options. In this paper we apply a number of research hypotheses tested in recent US studies to a European sample of EuroStoxx 50 companies. Due to the globalisation, the similar accounting regulations and the IT and telecommunications revolu tions, Europe and the United States have grown closer together than ever before and are expected to display similar business practices. This assessment should be especially relevant for the large European companies, which mostly have a dual listing in the United States and are therefore essentially forced to manage according to American practices. How ever, the results differ significantly from the existing US research, providing insufficient grounds to accept previous findings for European companies.

The human aspects of mergers and acquisitions receive less emphasis than the more easily controlled financial aspects. A review of the existing literature and research suggests that mergers and acquisitions often fail or are sub‐optimal due to the neglect of these human aspects. Outlines factors which lead to success. Recommends alternatives which may minimize the behavioural problems, but this is unlikely to include the joint venture, since it is quite similar to the full‐blooded merger in many respects. Human and environmental issues will increasingly be on the corporate charter.

SERVQUAL, an instrument developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, is currently the most popular measure of service quality. Compares these original studies with subsequent research employing the SERVQUAL instrument. Analyzes its psychometric properties to gain some basic insights into the overall utility of this measure, and offers directions for its use in future research. Discusses managerial implications and recommendations resulting from these analyses.

To date, corporate governance research agendas have tended to concentrate on one particular role that a board performs. For instance, agency theory concentrates on the monitoring role, resource dependence theory concentrates on the board providing access to resources and stewardship theory concentrates on the board’s advice‐giving or strategic role. While these approaches provide practitioners with useful guidelines regarding issues such as board independence, we contend that practitioners need to take care not to act on the recommendations from a single theory in isolation from the others. To address this concern, we provide a model of board effectiveness that uses the construct of board intellectual capital to integrate the predominant theories of corporate governance and illustrate how the board can drive corporate performance. We further contend that boards that wish to improve their performance need to review their intellectual capital. We conclude by linking the model to a practitioner‐focused framework that identifies four key areas on which a board must concentrate to develop its intellectual capital.