We study the welfare effects of a merger between ad-funded platforms facing elastic consumer demand. We show that … advertising fees as well as quality investment levels by the platforms fall post-merger. Interestingly, despite the lower … this result is that the decrease in quality investments post-merger reduces overall consumer participation. Thus, studying …

airlines, the merger is less detrimental to the frequency, possibly because the merger removes serial marginalization in the … flights, mergers have almost no impact on the frequency. The second set-up uses the market structure before the merger. When … one of the merging partners controlled all the flights between two airports, the merger does not directly affect the …