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

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Nevo, A
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: RAND JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0741-6261
• DOI: 10.2307/2600994
• 发表日期: 2000
• 页码: 395-421
• 关键词: discrete-choice models; ORGANIZATION; demand

摘要

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 Jive mergers, two of which occurred and for which I compare predicted to actual outcomes.