Downstream mergers in vertically related markets with capacity constraints
Article dans une revue: Motivated by a recent merger proposal in the French outdoor advertising market, we develop a model in which firms are initially endowed with some advertising capacities and compete on two fronts. First, firms compete to acquire additional advertising capacities on an upstream market; a first stage modeled as a second-price auction with externalities. Second, those firms, privately informed on their own costs, use their capacities on the downstream market to supply advertisers whose demand is random; a second stage modeled by means of mechanism design techniques. We study the linkages between the equilibrium outcomes on both markets. When a firm is endowed with more initial capacity, through the acquisition of a competitor for instance, whether it becomes more or less eager to acquire extra capacity on the upstream market depends a priori on fine details of the downstream market. Under reasonable choices of functional forms, we demonstrate that a downstream merger does not create any bias in the upstream market towards the already dominant firm. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Auteur(s)
David Martimort, Jérôme Pouyet
Revue
- International Journal of Industrial Organization
Date de publication
- 2020
Mots-clés JEL
Mots-clés
- Merger
- Vertically related markets
- Competition with capacity constraints
URL de la notice HAL
Version
- 1
Volume
- 72