Berkeley Program in Law and Economics

The value of the freezeout option is critical in many legal policy issues concerning corporate law. In this article, we present, for the first time, a method for determining the value of the minority stock and the freezeout option. We price the freezeout option with two different sets of assumptions regarding the controlling shareholder informational advantage, using both an exogenous and endogenous stock prices in our pricing. The result of our model indicates that the freezeout option has a low value and the minority stock is only slightly discounted. This result implies that the use of publicly known information, including market prices, in determining a fair value for minority stocks will not cause expropriation of minority shareholders and will not lead to inefficiency in corporate and controlling owners’ decisions. Empirical studies support this view.