Webinar: Market power: A powerful motive for mergers in extractive industries
Amrita Ray Chaudhuri – University of Winnipeg, Canada
We examine firms’ incentives to acquire rivals in an effort to monopolize an exhaustible resource sector, and the equilibrium industry structure that emerges when the acquisition price is endogenous. Given a market structure, firrms compete in quantities: each entity chooses its extraction policy, i.e. a Markovian strategy that allows extraction rate to depend on the vector of stocks. When the firrms' stocks are sufficiently small, in contrast to the static Cournot case, monopolization becomes a profitable strategy. The firm with the largest stock is the least likely to monopolize the industry. For a given acquirer, the gains from monopolization are only positive if the targets’ stocks are neither too large nor too small. The lower the demand elasticity, the less likely that either extreme case, i.e. monopoly or the unmerged equilibrium, occurs. (with Hassan Benchekroun and Ying Tung Chan).

Location
Montréal Québec
Canada