Arbeitspapier

Consumer Search Costs and the Incentives to merge under Bertrand Competition

This paper studies the incentives to merge in a Bertrand competitionmodel where firms sell differentiated products and consumers search the marketfor satisfactory deals. In the pre-merger market equilibrium, all firms lookalike and so the probability a firm is next in the queue consumers follow whenvisiting firms is equal across non-visited firms. However, after a merger,insiders raise their prices more than the outsiders so consumers search forgood deals first at the non-merging stores and then, if they do not find anyproduct satisfactory enough, they continue searching at the merging stores.When search cost are negligible, the results of Deneckere and Davidson (1985)hold. However, as search costs increase, the merging firms receive fewercustomers so mergers become unprofitable for sufficiently large search costs.This new merger paradox is more likely the higher the number of non-mergingfirms.

Sprache
Englisch

Erschienen in
Series: Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper ; No. 11-099/1

Klassifikation
Wirtschaft
Market Structure, Pricing, and Design: General
Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
Thema
mergers
search
insiders
outsiders
order of search
prominence

Ereignis
Geistige Schöpfung
(wer)
Moraga-Gonzalez, Jose Luis
Petrikaite, Vaiva
Ereignis
Veröffentlichung
(wer)
Tinbergen Institute
(wo)
Amsterdam and Rotterdam
(wann)
2011

Handle
Letzte Aktualisierung
10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ

Datenpartner

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ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Bei Fragen zum Objekt wenden Sie sich bitte an den Datenpartner.

Objekttyp

  • Arbeitspapier

Beteiligte

  • Moraga-Gonzalez, Jose Luis
  • Petrikaite, Vaiva
  • Tinbergen Institute

Entstanden

  • 2011

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