Mergers with Differentiated Products: The Case of the Ready-to-Eat Cereal Industry
提出一种替代传统合并分析的方法，通过需求估计和合并后行为模型模拟差异化产品市场的竞争效应，并以即食谷物行业为例，对五个合并案例进行预测并与实际结果比较。
Traditional merger analysis is difficult to implement when evaluating mergers in industries with differentiated products. I discuss an alternative, which consists of demand estimation and the use of a model of postmerger conduct to simulate the competitive effects of a merger. I estimate a brand-level demand system for ready-to-eat cereal using supermarket scanner data and use the estimates to (1) recover marginal costs, (2) simulate postmerger price equilibria, and (3) compute welfare effects, under a variety of assumptions. The methodology is applied to five mergers, two of which occurred and for which I compare predicted to actual outcomes.