Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the question of pre‐emptive merger decisions in a composite good framework where these goods have both competitive and complementary features. Design/methodology/approach – The paper constructs a model of partial mergers when there are three...

We provide a comparative welfare analysis of domestic and cross-national mergers. We focus, in particular, on the importance of possible synergies in mergers, the existing market structure and the bargaining power of the merging firms (in the case of a cross-border merger).