IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/stabus/1739r.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The BP Amoco/ARCO Merger: Alaskan Crude Oil

Author

Listed:
  • Bulow, Jeremy I.

    (Stanford U)

  • Shapiro, Carl

    (U of California, Berkeley)

Abstract

The merger of British Petroleum and Atlantic Richfield as proposed would have made BP the sole operator and 70 percent owner of Alaska's oil fields. The Federal Trade Commission challenged the merger partly out of concern for higher West Coast gasoline prices, and required a divestiture ARCO's entire Alaskan business. However, West Coast crude prices are governed by the cost of the marginal source of supply to the region, imported oil. Because any cutback in sales of Alaskan oil on the West Coast could be offset with higher imports, with minimal impact on the import price, the merger would have raised crude prices by tenths of a penny per gallon at the most. The impact on consumer prices was even more tenuous. More serious concerns, which were given less attention, were that BP might gain monopsony power in bidding for oil leases and perhaps in negotiating with suppliers.

Suggested Citation

  • Bulow, Jeremy I. & Shapiro, Carl, 2002. "The BP Amoco/ARCO Merger: Alaskan Crude Oil," Research Papers 1739r, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:1739r
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/RP1739R.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ioannis N. Pinopoulos, 2020. "Upstream horizontal mergers involving a vertically integrated firm," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 130(1), pages 67-83, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:1739r. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsstaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.