This paper seeks to show that even though a product market competitor holds the least cost input production technology, it may outsource its input production to an independent input producer and buy inputs from the firm at a higher price instead of producing inputs in-house for itself....

Cost asymmetries between the public and the private firms create a rationale for privatising the public firms. We show that this argument is restrictive, since it does not allow for other ways of reducing production inefficiency, which creates the motivation for privatisation. If the profit...