This paper tests the presence of multiple independent submarkets in the Italian motor insurance industry. Independence is motivated by administrative boundaries among provinces and by further locational reasons. We find that the independence effects are sufficient to induce a minimum degree of...

Sutton (1998) has recently proposed a theoretical lower bound to firm size inequality when a market is made of several independent submarkets. His results are valid asymptotically, as the number of submarkets becomes arbitrarily large. We show that, in small samples, his results can be...