Big Data Analytics and M&A Announcements: The Attention-Based View

In today’s digitally connected world, the big data revolution has drawn attention from scholars and practitioners, with China making “Big Data Strategy” one of its most important national strategies in 2015, driving Chinese firms to adopt Big Data Analytics (‘BDA’) in many aspects of business, including Mergers and Acquisitions (‘M&A’). Building on the attention-based view, this study explores the impact of managerial attention to BDA on firm’s number of M&A announcements based on a sample of 1,822 Chinese public firms with 9,702 firm-year observations between 2015 and 2021. This study found that there is a positive association between the acquiring firm’s BDA attention and the number of M&A deals it announced. Furthermore, this association is contingent on the acquiring firm’s external environment and internal factors. More specifically, environmental uncertainty positively moderates the association between BDA attention and the number of M&A announcements, while the firm’s effectiveness of capabilities deployment positively moderates, and prior M&A experience negatively moderates this association. By examining these external and internal factors affecting BDA attention and M&A announcements, this study enriches existing literature and provides new insights into BDA’s role in M&A activities.