Using only information on the degree of concavity of demand and observable structural variables as the market share of firms, a necessary and sufficient condition for a merger to increase welfare is derived. On the profitability side, we obtain that when market size decreases merger...

Salant et al. (1983) showed in a Cournot setting that horizontal mergers are unprofitable because outsiders react by increasing their output. We show that this negative effect may be compensated by the positive effect that horizontal mergers have on the buyer power of merging firms in input markets.

A monopolist retailer facing two suppliers producing two symmetric and independent goods improves its bargaining position by commiting to sell only one good. We analyze if this advantage extends to the case where there are two undierentiated retailers competing in the same market. With linear...

We consider two (symmetric) upstream firms producing independent goods that sell to consumers through symmetric retailers. The distinguishing feature of retailers is that they have a selling capacity, in the sense, that there is an upper limit in the total units of the two goods they can sell....

In the context of an international unionized oligopoly, with vertical differentiation and downstream and upstream firms locked in a bilateral monopoly, the pattern of downstream mergers is investigated. In such a setting, a downstream merger leads to a reduction in the price of the inputs. Such...