Complementarity without Superadditivity

Steven Berry (), Philip Haile, Mark Israel and Michael Katz ()

No 22811, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The distinction between complements, substitutes, and independent goods is important in many contexts. It is well known that when consumers’ conditional indirect utilities for two goods are superadditive, the goods are gross complements. Generalizing insights in Gans and King (2006) and Gentzkow (2007), we show that superadditivity between one pair of goods can also introduce complementarity between competing pairs of goods. One implication is that lower prices can result from a merger between producers of goods that themselves offer no superadditivity.

JEL-codes: L13 L4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-mic
Note: IO
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Published as Berry, Steven & Haile, Philip & Israel, Mark & Katz, Michael, 2017. "Complementarity without superadditivity," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 28-30.

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Journal Article: Complementarity without superadditivity (2017)
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