be visited by a consumer is equal acrossfirms not yet visited. However, in the short-run after a merger, because insiders …This paper studies the incentives to merge in a Bertrand competition model where firms sell differentiatedproducts and … consumers search for satisfactory deals. In the pre-merger symmetricequilibrium, the probability that a firm is the next one to …

merger,insiders raise their prices more than the outsiders so consumers search forgood deals first at the non-merging stores … receive fewercustomers so mergers become unprofitable for sufficiently large search costs.This new merger paradox is more …This paper studies the incentives to merge in a Bertrand competitionmodel where firms sell differentiated products and …

post-merger. We show that this change in the search composition of demand makes mergers incentive-compatible for the firms … primary effects of a merger. Our main result is that the level of search costs are crucial in determining the incentives of …We study mergers in a market where N firms sell a homogeneous good and consumers search sequentially to discover prices …