Damodaran’s structure is deliberately confrontational: the collective evidence on acquirer returns is poor, the biases that produce overpayment, deal momentum, synergy inflation, adviser incentives, the winner’s curse, are systematic, and so the remedy must be structural too: separate the people who value from the people who negotiate, price synergies skeptically, prefer small and boring, and be willing to walk. The seven steps are a checklist wearing a joke.
The Institute’s reading: he is the loyal opposition to this entire site, and that is exactly why he is on the shelf. The honest synthesis: his aggregate pessimism is drawn largely from public-company acquirers, while this shelf’s Fuller, Netter and Stegemoller entry shows private-target buyers systematically doing better, and his disciplines are precisely how they do it. Assign this lecture to whoever on your team is most in love with the deal.
His aggregate pessimism sits in deliberate tension with the private-target evidence elsewhere on this shelf; the Institute keeps both because the pessimism is the reason the private buyer’s discipline works.