KIM, ROSA2024-03-292024-03-292022-02https://hdl.handle.net/11299/261985University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. February 2022. Major: Business Administration. Advisors: Mary Benner, Aseem Kaul. 1 computer file (PDF); iv, 91 pages.In my dissertation, I explore how strategic incongruence arises from attributes of firms’ strategies that make it hard for outside investors to understand and evaluate, i.e., strategies that are not aligned with what investors expect to see. This stems further from the information asymmetries in public equity markets that make it hard for investors to fully grasp the intent and potential effect of firms’ strategies. Consequently, investors often use historical and social referents to evaluate companies, generally comparing them with peer companies in the same industry (Zuckerman, 1999; Zuckerman, 2004), and creating expectations that similar companies within the same industry will pursue familiar strategies. Companies that deviate from these expectations of market participants, i.e., that have greater levels of strategic incongruence, are subject to valuation discounts and pressures from investors, even if they have high-quality strategies. Specifically, I explore the investment aspect that may accentuate the effect. Focusing on the idea of strategic incongruence, I propose that it arises from particular types of strategies that misalign with market anticipation due to information asymmetry, and further, that it drives increasing attention from proactive investors (Essay 1), firms’ decisions to become private (Essay 2), and decisions not to go public (Essay 3).enThesis or Dissertation