Which motives initiate managers to merge or to acquire other corporations? Florian Geiger gives a comprehensive overview about mergers and acquisitions in the machinery industry evaluating merger motives, benefits, and success of transactions. He closes the gap between theory and practice providing insights into merger rent generation on an empirical as well as a case study basis. He empirically tests a unique dataset of 330 machinery mergers using state-of-the-art statistical analysis providing many intriguing and surprising results. Both, theoretical and related empirical evidence provided serve as a starting point and guideline for future merger decision and evaluation in the machinery industry.