 USING RETAIL DATA FOR UPSTREAM MERGER ANALYSISJournal of Competition Law and Economics, 2007, vol. 3, issue 4, 689-715 Abstract: The typical situation that antitrust authorities face is to analyze a proposed manufacturer merger using scanner data at retail level. I start with a benchmark model of manufacturers' and retailers' sequential pricing behavior. Then I perform counterfactual experiments to explore the relationship between downstream retailer pricing models and the resulting estimates of upstream mergers, in the absence of wholesale prices. Looking at scanner data for the ground coffee category sold at several retail chains in Germany, I find that not considering retail pricing explicitly when analyzing the potential consequences of an upstream merger results in simulated changes in welfare that are significantly different given the underlying model of retail pricing behavior. These findings are relevant for competition policy, and authorities should consider incorporating the role of retailers in upstream merger analyses, especially in the presence of increasingly consolidated retail food markets. Date: 2007 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jcomle:v:3:y:2007:i:4:p:689-715. Access Statistics for this article Journal of Competition Law and Economics is currently edited by Nicholas Economides, Amelia Fletcher, Michal Gal, Damien Geradin, Ioannis Lianos and Tommaso Valletti More articles in Journal of Competition Law and Economics from Oxford University Press |
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