Looking back for future directions: a literature review analysis of investors’ demand for IPOs

Purpose

A critical factor to the success of IPOs is investor demand, which can be observed from the IPO subscription pattern. Therefore, the objective of this study is to review the studies on the demand of IPOs, including empirical and theoretical literature, due to the substantial growth of IPOs over the last two decades.

Design/methodology/approach

This study extracted secondary data regarding IPO demand published from 1988 to 2022 from the Scopus database. We conducted a meta-literature review for qualitative and quantitative methods on the resulting 284 articles using citation analysis (Harzing’s Publish or Perish and VOS viewer software) and content analysis.

Findings

The findings revealed significant elements of the literature, including countries, institutions, journals, authors, articles and topics. Based on the IPO literature review and analyses, this paper developed future research questions to facilitate an extension of the research. Additionally, this paper developed a dual perspective of the present state of IPO research. First, it asserts that the demand for IPOs is not limited to certain countries, jurisdictions or vintages. Second, there are very few studies on demand for IPOs available despite IPOs’ economic worth.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to present an empirical evaluation of demand for IPOs using inclusive mapping.