The question of what impact mergers and acquisitions have on key equilibrium performance measures is fundamental to our understanding of competitive dynamics in an oligopolistic industry. We address these questions in the context of price competition models with differentiated goods and...

We study welfare effects of horizontal mergers under a successive oligopoly model and find that downstream mergers can increase welfare if they reduce input prices. The lower input price shifts some input production from cost-inefficient upstream firms to cost-efficient ones. Also, the lower...

We show that the presence of a strategic tax policy increases the incentive for a horizontal merger compared to the situation with no tax policy. Thus, we point towards a new factor, viz., strategic tax policy, for increasing the incentive for a horizontal merger that has been ignored in the...

An increasing number of horizontal agreements involve both competitors and their common suppliers (or retailers). As vertical agreements, indirect horizontal agreements can help reduce coordination failures, but they also have the capacity to dampen competition. The negative welfare effect of...

In August, 2010, the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission issued new Guidelines for assessing the competitive effects of horizontal mergers under the antitrust laws. These Guidelines were long awaited not merely because of the lengthy interval between them and previous Guidelines...

We study the incentives towards horizontal merger among firms when the amount of capital is the strategic variable. We focus on is workers' cooperatives, but our conclusions apply also to employment-constrained profit maximisers. Within a simple oligopoly model, we prove that the horizontal...