“…These risks pertain to issues such as target valuation and customer concentration at target firms (Cheng et al, 2022). While studies in this frontier examine a variety of mechanisms/devices for mitigating information asymmetry, including the use of stock (Cheng et al, 2022), contingent considerations such as earnouts (Battauz et al, 2021), seller financing (Jansen, 2020), earnings smoothing (Doukas & Zhang, 2020), sharing of same industry between acquirers and targets (Perafán‐Peña et al, 2022) and other contracting and signalling mechanisms in acquisitions, the predominant focus has been on earnouts. In particular, the research in this cluster documents that in addition to information asymmetry, the acquirer's cultural background (Ewelt‐Knauer et al, 2021), acquirer's earnings quality (Prencipe & Viarengo, 2022) and change in accounting standards (Chaney et al, 2020) can also influence the use of earnouts as a payment method in acquisitions.…”