Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/car/carecp/14-11.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Horizontal Mergers in the Presence of Capacity Constraints

Author

Abstract
We analyze the effects of a merger between two competitors in a Bertrand-Edgeworth model. The merger has no effect on equilibrium prices if a pure strategy equilibrium prevails both before and after the merger. Otherwise, the merger leads to higher prices. In the case where a mixed strategy equilibrium prevails before and after the merger, for example, the support of the price distributions shifts rightward after the merger and the post-merger price distribution of each firm stochastically dominates its pre-merger counterpart. The pre-merger capacity level of each firm plays a crucial role in determining the effects of the merger.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhiqi Chen & Gang Li, 2014. "Horizontal Mergers in the Presence of Capacity Constraints," Carleton Economic Papers 14-11, Carleton University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:car:carecp:14-11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.carleton.ca/economics/wp-content/uploads/cep14-11.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Farrell, Joseph & Shapiro, Carl, 1990. "Horizontal Mergers: An Equilibrium Analysis," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(1), pages 107-126, March.
    2. repec:pri:cepsud:140weinberg is not listed on IDEAS
    3. McAfee, R Preston & Simons, Joseph J & Williams, Michael A, 1992. "Horizontal Mergers in Spatially Differentiated Noncooperative Markets," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(4), pages 349-358, December.
    4. Massimo A. De Francesco & Neri Salvadori, 2013. "Bertrand-Edgeworth Competition in an Almost Symmetric Oligopoly," Studies in Microeconomics, , vol. 1(2), pages 213-219, December.
    5. Stephen W. Salant & Sheldon Switzer & Robert J. Reynolds, 1983. "Losses From Horizontal Merger: The Effects of an Exogenous Change in Industry Structure on Cournot-Nash Equilibrium," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 98(2), pages 185-199.
    6. Levitan, Richard & Shubik, Martin, 1972. "Price Duopoly and Capacity Constraints," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 13(1), pages 111-122, February.
    7. Vives, Xavier, 1986. "Rationing rules and Bertrand-Edgeworth equilibria in large markets," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 113-116.
    8. Partha Dasgupta & Eric Maskin, 1986. "The Existence of Equilibrium in Discontinuous Economic Games, I: Theory," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 53(1), pages 1-26.
    9. Perry, Martin K & Porter, Robert H, 1985. "Oligopoly and the Incentive for Horizontal Merger," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 75(1), pages 219-227, March.
    10. Partha Dasgupta & Eric Maskin, 1986. "The Existence of Equilibrium in Discontinuous Economic Games, II: Applications," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 53(1), pages 27-41.
    11. Osborne, Martin J. & Pitchik, Carolyn, 1986. "Price competition in a capacity-constrained duopoly," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 38(2), pages 238-260, April.
    12. Daughety, Andrew F, 1990. "Beneficial Concentration," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(5), pages 1231-1237, December.
    13. Unknown, 1986. "Letters," Choices: The Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resource Issues, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 1(4), pages 1-9.
    14. Lommerud, Kjell Erik & Sorgard, Lars, 1997. "Merger and product range rivalry," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 21-42, November.
    15. De Francesco, Massimo A. & Salvadori, Neri, 2008. "Bertrand-Edgeworth games under oligopoly with a complete characterization for the triopoly," MPRA Paper 10767, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 26 Sep 2008.
    16. Beth Allen & Martin Hellwig, 1986. "Bertrand-Edgeworth Oligopoly in Large Markets," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 53(2), pages 175-204.
    17. Braid, Ralph M., 1999. "The price and profit effects of horizontal mergers in two-dimensional spatial competition," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 62(1), pages 113-119, January.
    18. Braid, Ralph M., 1986. "Stackelberg price leadership in spatial competition," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 4(4), pages 439-449, December.
    19. Higgins Richard S & Johnson Paul A & Sullivan John T, 2004. "Spatial Competition and Merger," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 1-37, March.
    20. Davidson, Carl & Deneckere, Raymond, 1984. "Horizontal mergers and collusive behavior," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 2(2), pages 117-132, June.
    21. Levy, David T & Reitzes, James D, 1992. "Anticompetitive Effects of Mergers in Markets with Localized Competition," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 8(2), pages 427-440, April.
    22. Matthew Weinberg, 2008. "The Price Effects Of Horizontal Mergers," Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 4(2), pages 433-447.
    23. Froeb, Luke & Tschantz, Steven & Crooke, Philip, 2003. "Bertrand competition with capacity constraints: mergers among parking lots," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 113(1), pages 49-67, March.
    24. Hirata Daisuke, 2009. "Asymmetric Bertrand-Edgeworth Oligopoly and Mergers," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 9(1), pages 1-25, July.
    25. Raymond Deneckere & Carl Davidson, 1985. "Incentives to Form Coalitions with Bertrand Competition," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 16(4), pages 473-486, Winter.
    26. David M. Kreps & Jose A. Scheinkman, 1983. "Quantity Precommitment and Bertrand Competition Yield Cournot Outcomes," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 14(2), pages 326-337, Autumn.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Iwan Bos & Marco A. Marini, 2022. "Oligopoly Pricing: The Role of Firm Size and Number," Games, MDPI, vol. 14(1), pages 1-16, December.
    2. Chen, You-hua & Chen, Liu-man & Mishra, Ashok K., 2021. "Information, Capacity Constraints and Quality on Firms Competition," 2021 ASAE 10th International Conference (Virtual), January 11-13, Beijing, China 329427, Asian Society of Agricultural Economists (ASAE).
    3. Bakaouka, Elpiniki & Escrihuela-Villar, Marc & Ferrarese, Walter, 2024. "Horizontal mergers with Bertrand competition and convex costs," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 128(C), pages 60-67.
    4. Daniel Greenfield & Jeremy A. Sandford, 2021. "Upward pricing pressure in mergers of capacity‐constrained firms," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 59(4), pages 1723-1747, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Massimo A. De Francesco & Neri Salvadori, 2022. "Bertrand–Edgeworth oligopoly: Characterization of mixed strategy equilibria when some firms are large and the others are small," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 73(3), pages 803-824, July.
    2. De Francesco, Massimo A. & Salvadori, Neri, 2016. "Bertrand-Edgeworth games under triopoly: the equilibrium strategies when the payoffs of the two smallest firms are proportional to their capacities," MPRA Paper 69999, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. De Francesco, Massimo A. & Salvadori, Neri, 2015. "Bertrand-Edgeworth games under triopoly: the payoffs," MPRA Paper 64638, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Jacobs, Martin & Requate, Till, 2016. "Bertrand-Edgeworth markets with increasing marginal costs and voluntary trading: Experimental evidence," Economics Working Papers 2016-01, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Department of Economics.
    5. Jacobs, Martin & Requate, Till, 2016. "Demand rationing in Bertrand-Edgeworth markets with fixed capacities: An experiment," Economics Working Papers 2016-03, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Department of Economics.
    6. Attila Tasnádi, 2016. "Endogenous timing of moves in Bertrand–Edgeworth triopolies," International Journal of Economic Theory, The International Society for Economic Theory, vol. 12(4), pages 317-334, December.
    7. Massimo A. De Francesco & Neri Salvadori, 2013. "Bertrand-Edgeworth Competition in an Almost Symmetric Oligopoly," Studies in Microeconomics, , vol. 1(2), pages 213-219, December.
    8. Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz & Kalyan Talluri, 2011. "Dynamic Price Competition with Fixed Capacities," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 57(6), pages 1078-1093, June.
    9. Prabal Roy Chowdhury, 2004. "Bertrand-Edgeworth equilibrium: Manipulable residual demand," Discussion Papers 04-15, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi.
    10. García Díaz, Antón, 1998. "List princing and pure strategy outcomes in a bertrand edgeworth duopoly," UC3M Working papers. Economics 6089, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía.
    11. Allison, Blake A. & Lepore, Jason J., 2014. "Verifying payoff security in the mixed extension of discontinuous games," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 291-303.
    12. Cosnita-Langlais, Andreea, 2012. "Horizontal market concentration: Theoretical insights from spatial models," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(1), pages 22-32.
    13. Prabal Roy Chowdhury, 2004. "Bertrand-Edgeworth equilibrium with a large number of firms," Discussion Papers 04-12, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi.
    14. Belleflamme,Paul & Peitz,Martin, 2015. "Industrial Organization," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107687899, September.
    15. Emilie Dargaud & Carlo Reggiani, 2015. "On The Price Effects Of Horizontal Mergers: A Theoretical Interpretation," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 67(3), pages 236-255, July.
    16. Tasnádi, Attila, 2001. "A Bertrand-Edgeworth-oligopóliumok. Irodalmi áttekintés [Bertrand-Edgeworth oligopolies - a survey of the literature]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(12), pages 1081-1092.
    17. Baik, Kyung Hwan, 1995. "Horizontal mergers of price-setting firms with sunk capacity costs," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 245-256.
    18. George Norman & Lynne Pepall, 2000. "Profitable Mergers in a Cournot Model of Spatial Competition," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 66(3), pages 667-681, January.
    19. De Francesco, Massimo A. & Salvadori, Neri, 2023. "Bertrand-Edgeworth game under oligopoly. General results and comparisons with duopoly," MPRA Paper 118237, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Massimo A. Francesco, 2014. "A Dynamic Entry And Price Game With Capacity Indivisibility," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 66(4), pages 406-419, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Merger; capacity constraints; Bertrand-Edgeworth model;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • L40 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:car:carecp:14-11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Court Lindsay (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.