Endogenous Mergers in Markets with Vertically Differentiated Products

Jean Gabszewicz, Marco Marini and Ornella Tarola

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper studies the incentives of firms selling vertically differentiated products to merge. To this aim, we introduce a three-stage game in which, at the first stage, three independent firms can decide to merge with their competitors via a sequential game of coalition formation and, at the second and third stage, they can optimally revise their qualities and prices, respectively. We study whether such binding agreements (i.e. full or partial mergers) can be sustained as subgame perfect equilibria of the coalition formation game, and analyze their effects on equilibrium qualities, prices and profits. We find that, although profitable, the merger-to-monopoly of all firms is not an outcome of the finite-horizon negotiation, where only partial mergers arise. Moroever, we show that all stable mergers always include the firm initially producing the bottom quality good and reduce the number of variants on sale.

Keywords: Mergers; Price Collusion; Vertically Differentiated Products; Sequential Game of Coalition Formation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 D21 L1 L11 L13 L16 L4 L41 L43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-com, nep-gth, nep-ind, nep-mic and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/80528/2/MPRA_paper_80528.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Endogenous Mergers in Markets with Vertically Differentiated Products (2019)
Working Paper: Endogenous mergers in markets with vertically differentiated products (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:80528

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().