"Ready, AIM, acquire: Impression offsetting in the context of mergers and acquisitions"

We introduce impression offsetting, an anticipatory impression management technique which occurs when a firm announces a focal event contemporaneously with positive, significant, but unrelated information. We predict that impression offsetting will occur more frequently when organizations perceive increased risk to their social evaluations and that it will be effective in influencing impressions. In our acquisitions sample, we find that characteristics of acquirers and their announced acquisitions predict the use of impression offsetting. We also find that impression offsetting is successful on average and, in the mean case, reduces the negative reaction to acquisition announcements by 56 percent.