The argument turns on what information does. A private target is opaque, which cuts both ways: it limits how broadly you can search and raises the risk of misjudging what you are buying, but it also creates room to exploit knowledge others do not have. A public target comes pre-valued by a market that has already done the information processing for every bidder, which removes both the risk and the edge.
The findings follow from that. Acquirers favor private targets in industries they already know, and turn to public targets when entering a new business domain or an industry heavy in intangible assets, precisely where their own judgment is weakest. Acquirers of private targets performed better on announcement than acquirers of public ones after controlling for selection. Most usefully, the fit itself paid: buyers of private firms did better than they would have done buying public, and buyers of public firms did better than they would have done buying private.
The practical translation for an owner is a rule about your own search. Your informational edge is your industry. Hunting privately inside it is where the advantage lives; hunting privately outside it means paying for opacity you have no way to see through, and that is the case for a visible, intermediated process instead.
This measures public acquirers buying private targets, so the buyer in the data is larger and better resourced than most readers of this site. The direction of the argument, that your edge is bounded by what you already understand, transfers cleanly; the announcement returns do not, because a private buyer has no announcement.