MERGERS IN A PARTIALLY CARTELIZED MARKET

Marc Escrihuela-Villar ()

Working Papers. Serie AD from Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie)

Abstract: The paper studies a Partial Cartel model where only a subset of firms colludes. In this model, firms' ability to collude depends on the discount factor. In addition, as hardly any attention has been given by the literature to the case where mergers take place in a collusive framework, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the competitive effects of horizontal mergers on profits and welfare in a Partially Cartelized market. We show that both mergers among fringe and cartel firms increase market price. Regarding merger profitability, the discount factor decreases cartel members' merger profitability. However, the higher cartel members' discount factor, the more fringe firms will be willing to merge. An example of this could be the intense wave of mergers among oil firms that coincided with a large period of high oil prices caused by the OPEC production cuts.

Keywords: collusion; partial cartels; trigger strategies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L13 L40 L41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2003-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published by Ivie

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ivie.es/downloads/docs/wpasad/wpasad-2003-29.pdf Fisrt version / Primera version, 2003 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ivi:wpasad:2003-29

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers. Serie AD from Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Departamento de Edición ().