Abstract
The transactions-costs literature on vertical integration emphasizes that nonintegrated firms tend to make socially sub-optimal relationship-specific investments due to ex-post opportunism. This literature views vertical integration as a contractual remedy to overcome this underinvestment problem. In this paper, we demonstrate that integrating firms may inefficiently reduce non-specific investments for strategic reasons, e.g., to raise rival firms׳ costs. We construct a simple equilibrium model of investment-reducing vertical integration, which also shows that anticompetitive vertical integration (both for consumer welfare and for aggregate efficiency) can arise in equilibrium without making the troublesome assumption of price commitment by the integrating firms. Our results hold under both Bertrand and Cournot downstream competition.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 659-676 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Research in Economics |
| Volume | 70 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2016 Dec 1 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Earlier versions of this paper were circulated under the title “Equilibrium Vertical Foreclosure with Investment” and “Anticompetitive Vertical Integration with Investment”. The second author thanks NYU Stern School of Business and Queens College where preliminary work on this paper was done. We thank Greg Shaffer and seminar audiences at Brown, Columbia, CUNY Graduate Center, HEC, NYU and Simon School of Business at Rochester for their comments. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A5A2A01022389).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 University of Venice
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Economics and Econometrics