Theory shows that vertical integration has contrasting two effects, efficiency and foreclosure effects. This study empirically estimates the relative size of these two effects. Unlike previous studies, I focus on a single vertical merger in order to use a panel dataset, and estimate its average...

This paper examines a change in the level of competition in the Japanese life insurance industry over the last 17 years. We estimate the first order condition for profit-maximizing insurance oligopolies to obtain the degree of non-competition and collusion. Estimation results suggest that: 1)...

Personalized pricing has become a reality through digitization. We examine firms' incentives to adopt one of the three pricing schemes: uniform, personalized, or group pricing in a Hotelling duopoly model. There are two types of consumer groups that are heterogeneous in their mismatch costs. We...

This paper explores a panel data set matching establishment-based production statistics from Japan’s Census of Manufacturers with wholesale price indices from the Bank of Japan, and Herfindahl indices from the Japan Fair Trade Commission. The data include annual observations over the period...

This paper investigates an asymmetric duopoly model with a Hotelling line. We find that helping a small (minor) firm can reduce both social and consumer surplus. This makes a sharp contrast to existing works showing that helping minor firms can reduce social surplus but always improves consumer...

Using a simple product differentiation model with elastic demands, we investigate the relationship between differentiation strategies and vertical relations. Depending on the competitive structure in the upstream market, three differentiation patterns (maximum, minimum and partial...

This paper formulates a duopoly model in which firms care about relative profits as well as their own profits. Our purpose is to investigate the relationship between the weight of relative performance and R&D expenditure. We find a non-monotone relationship between the weight of relative...

We investigate the incentive and the welfare implications of a merger when heterogeneous oligopolists compete both in process R&D and on the product market. We examine how a merger affects the output, investment, and profits of firms, whether firms have merger incentives, and, if so, whether...

We provide a simple model to investigate decisions about vertical separation. The key feature of this model is that more than one input is required for the final product of the downstream monopolist. We show that as the bargaining powers of independent complementary input suppliers grow larger,...

It is often argued, though mostly informally, that outward foreign direct investment (FDI) is a synonym for the export of employment and thus detrimental to the home economy. To see whether and under what conditions this intuition indeed holds true, we construct a model of unionized duopoly and...