Premium Essay

Mergers with Differentiated Products - Nevo

In:

Submitted By Giannaj4j
Words 14181
Pages 57
RAND Journal of Economics Vol. 31, No. 3, Autumn 2000 pp. 395–421

Mergers with differentiated products: the case of the ready-to-eat cereal industry
Aviv Nevo*

Traditional merger analysis is difficult to implement when evaluating mergers in industries with differentiated products. I discuss an alternative, which consists of demand estimation and the use of a model of postmerger conduct to simulate the competitive effects of a merger. I estimate a brand-level demand system for ready-to-eat cereal using supermarket scanner data and use the estimates to (1) recover marginal costs, (2) simulate postmerger price equilibria, and (3) compute welfare effects, under a variety of assumptions. The methodology is applied to five mergers, two of which occurred and for which I compare predicted to actual outcomes.

1. Introduction
Traditional analysis of horizontal mergers is based primarily on industryconcentration measures. The market is defined and pre- and postmerger market shares of the relevant firms are used to compute pre- and postmerger concentration measures, which give rise to presumptions of illegality. Using this approach to evaluate mergers in industries with differentiated, or closely related but not identical, products is problematic. In many cases the product offerings make it difficult to define the relevant product (or geographic) market. Even if the relevant market can easily be defined, the computed concentration index provides a reasonable standard by which to judge the competitive effects of the merger only under strong assumptions.1 To deal with these challenges, a new methodology to evaluate mergers has been developed. 2 The basic idea consists of ‘‘front-end’’ estimation, in which demand functions and possibly supply relations are estimated, and a ‘‘back-end’’ analysis, in which the estimates are used to simulate the postmerger equilibrium. This

Similar Documents

Premium Essay

Operation Strategy Quality Measures

...The Role and Measurement of Quality in Competition Analysis 2013 The OECD Competition Committee discussed the role and measurement of quality in competition analysis in June 2013. This document contains an executive summary of that debate and the documents from the meeting: an analytical note by the OECD staff and written submissions: Australia, Canada, Chile, the European Union, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, United Kingdom, Ukraine, United States and BIAC. A note by Theodore Voorhees Jr. as well as a detailed summary of the discussion are also included. Competition policy is just as concerned with quality as it is with prices. While the importance of quality is undisputed and issues about quality are mentioned pervasively in competition agency guidelines and court decisions, there is no widely-agreed framework for analysing it which often renders its treatment superficial. There are a number of reasons why in practice, courts and competition authorities rarely analyse quality effects as rigorously as they analyse price effects. First, quality is a subjective concept and therefore much harder to define and measure than prices. In addition, microeconomic theory offers little help in predicting how changes in the level of competition in a market will affect quality and it is usually up to empirical analysis to determine how quality will change in response to varying degrees of competition in the context of particular markets. Given difficulties in terms of the evaluation...

Words: 125933 - Pages: 504

Free Essay

Annual Report

...ANNUAL REPORt 2011 Johnson & Johnson will continue to bring meaningful innovations to people around the world so they can live better and healthier lives. We are deeply committed and dedicated to the people who use our products, our employees, the communities in which we live and work, and you, our shareholders. Most important, we will never lose sight of who we are. ON tHE COVER Matt Cox, who has type 1 diabetes and uses the waterproof ANIMAS® VIBE™ insulin pump, swam an English Channel relay to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Matt wants to show his son, Jack, who also has type 1 diabetes, that the condition need not hold him back in life. Read Matt’s story on page 16. CHAIRMAN’S LETTER To Our Shareholders hroughout our annual report this year, you’ll read the severe economic decline; the tightening of consumer about how Johnson & Johnson is bringing meaningful spending and health care budgets; over-the-counter (OTC) innovation to our patients and customers, and making product quality issues at McNeil Consumer Healthcare and a difference in their lives in a personal way—from the recall of the DePuy ASR™ Hip System. Brunhilde Wecker, who made a full recovery from her stroke Our company was severely tested. thanks to our new blood clot retrieval and removal device, In managing through this stretch, we relied heavily on the resolve to our own Bill Hait, an oncologist whose vision and insights of our people and on our time-tested business...

Words: 55630 - Pages: 223