This paper studies Tesoro's 2013 acquisition of British Petroleum's Los Angeles refinery. We present a merger simulation model tailored to the gasoline market, which includes Cournot firms and a price-taking fringe. This hybrid model generates margins that are more plausible than those generated...

Merging firms regularly argue that mergers involving capacity-constrained firms are unlikely to be anti-competitive, because the incentive for the merged firm to raise prices and reduce quantity may not be strong enough to generate slack in the capacity constraints and lead to higher prices. We...