Acquisitions can grow the firm quickly, and allow the acquiring firm to benefit from the preexisting resources, incumbency status, and accumulated human capital and capabilities of the target firm. While prior studies have focused on performance implication of acquisitions, little research has examined the performance implication of serial acquirers or acquisition programs. In reality, many firms engage in a series of acquisitions as a primary method for firm expansion. Firms like Cisco, Apple and Pfizer have each engaged in at least 10 acquisitions in the past 5 years, and some firms have even acquired over 20 companies over that time period. Similarly, in Chinese real estate industry, firms are also very actively engaging in a serial of acquisition in an attempt to gain competitive advantage. It is therefore very important to understand the temporal structure and pacing of acquisition.

In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework and conduct an empirical investigation into the importance of the temporal dynamics of acquisition. We expect that an even pacing of acquisitions should be performance enhancing for firms by allowing acquiring firms a time to digest and rationalize prior acquisitions before taking on the burdens of additional acquisitions. We also examined the boundary conditions of firm level capability and industry level clock speed.