There is a recent tendency toward encouraging universities to merge. This policy is based on the idea that mergers create synergy gains that enhance universities’ prestige by increasing their international visibility. However, this process may reduce competition for both research funds and...

In this paper we analyze the effect strategic delegation on the profitability of mergers in the context of a Cournot oligopoly with linear demand and cost functions. It is assumed that, after the merging process is completed, the owner of every independent firm decides its managerial incentive...

The US Merger Guidelines consider that the anticompetitive effect of a horizontal merger is increasing in the initial market concentration and decreasing in the elasticity of demand. These ideas are studied in a setting where identical firms compete à la Cournot and marginal cost is constant....

In a setting where symmetric firms compete a la Cournot and costs are linear, the degree of concavity is identified as the main determinant of merger profitability. This allows to generalize the results in Salant et al (1983) and Cheung (1992).

It is well known that the profitability of horizontal mergers with quantity competition is scarce. However, in an asymmetric Stackelberg market we obtain that some mergers are profitable. Our main result is that mergers among followers become profitable when the followers are inefficient enough....

We analyze merger policy in an industry where firms participate in a non-tournament R&D competition. We conclude that merger policy should be, in general, less restrictive in high technology markets (pharmaceuticals and telecoms), because mergers reduce the wasteful duplication of R&D...