A Structural Approach to Market Definition With an Application to the Hospital Industry
Market definition is essential to merger analysis. Because no standard approach to market definition exists, opposing parties in antitrust cases often disagree about the extent of the market. These differences have been particularly relevant in the hospital industry, where the courts have denied seven of eight merger challenges since 1994, due largely to disagreements over geographic market definition. We compare geographic markets produced using common ad hoc methodologies to a method that directly applies the "SSNIP test" to hospitals in California using a structural model. Our results suggest that previously employed methods overstate hospital demand elasticities by a factor of 2.4 to 3.4 and define larger markets than would be implied by the merger guidelines's hypothetical monopolist test. The use of these methods in differentiated product industries may lead to mistaken geographic market delineation, and was likely a contributing factor to the permissive legal environment for hospital mergers.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 61 (2013)
Issue (Month): 2 (06)
Pages: 243-289
| Handle: | RePEc:bla:jindec:v:61:y:2013:i:2:p:243-289 |
| Contact details of provider: | Web page: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0022-1821
|
| Order Information: | Web: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/subs.asp?ref=0022-1821 |
References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- John Van Reenen, 2004.
"Is There a Market for Work Group Servers? Evaluating Market Level Demand Elasticities Using Micro and Macro Models,"
CEP Discussion Papers
dp0650, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
- John Van Reenen, 2004. "Is there a market for work group servers? Evaluating market level demand elasticities using micro and macro models," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 773, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jindec:v:61:y:2013:i:2:p:243-289. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing)
or (Christopher F. Baum)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.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.