On December 16th, 2011, Zynga, the well-known social game developing company
went public. This event followed other recent IPOs in the world of social
networking companies, such as Groupon or Linkedin among others. With a
valuation close to 7 billion USD at the time when it went public, Zynga became
one of the biggest web IPOs since Google. This recent enthusiasm for social
networking companies raises the question whether they are overvalued.
On December 16, Zynga, the well-known social game developing company went
public. This event is following other recent IPOs in the world of social
networking companies, such as Groupon, Linkedin or Pandora to cite a few. With
a valuation close to 7 billion USD at the time when it went public, Zynga has
become the biggest web IPO since Google. This recent enthusiasm for social
networking companies, and in particular Zynga, brings up the question whether
or not they are overvalued.
We present a novel methodology to determine the fundamental value of firms in
the social-networking sector, motivated by recent realized IPOs and by reports
that suggest sky-high valuations of firms such as facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn
Corp., Pandora Media Inc, Twitter, Zynga.
By combining (i) the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles, (ii)
behavioral finance on imitation and herding of investors and traders and (iii)
the mathematical and statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions,
the log-periodic power law model has been developed as a flexible tool to
detect bubbles. The LPPL model considers the faster-than-exponential (power law
with finite-time singularity) increase in asset prices decorated by
accelerating oscillations as the main diagnostic of bubbles.