IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/20649.html

The Competitive Effects of Mergers with Cournot Competition

Author

Listed:
  • Reisinger, Markus
  • Zenger, Hans

Abstract

This paper provides a full characterization of the competitive effects of horizontal mergers in the Cournot model with heterogeneous firms and constant marginal costs. We show that price effects depend only on the smaller merging firm's market share and the number of firms but are independent of the distribution of market shares among other firms. Standard concentration measures, instead, are often misleading. We also provide simple---yet general---closed-form solutions for merger effects based on pre-merger parameters. Moreover, we extend the model to study the combination of output and input market power and relate our results to the Merger Guidelines.

Suggested Citation

  • Reisinger, Markus & Zenger, Hans, 2025. "The Competitive Effects of Mergers with Cournot Competition," CEPR Discussion Papers 20649, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20649
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP20649
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
    • K21 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Antitrust Law
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • L41 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Monopolization; Horizontal Anticompetitive Practices

    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:cpr:ceprdp:20649. 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: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

    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.