Firm reputation and horizontal integration
研究横向整合如何影响企业声誉，发现整合既通过扩大市场和消除个别市场冲击帮助声誉建设，又因允许企业在部分市场偷工减料而阻碍声誉，由此提出最优企业规模的声誉理论。
We study effects of horizontal integration on firm reputation in an environment where customers observe only imperfect signals about firms' effort/quality choices. Horizontal integration leads to a larger market base for the merged firm, and thus helps reputation building with more effective punishments and better monitoring by eliminating idiosyncratic shocks of individual markets. But it allows the merged firm to deviate only in a subset of markets, which hinders reputation building by making it more difficult for consumers to monitor its quality. We show that these effects give rise to a reputation‐based theory of the optimal firm size and derive its comparative statics.