Oligopolistic Price Leadership and Mergers: The United States Beer Industry
研究了价格领导重复博弈模型，利用美国啤酒行业数据发现价格领导比伯特兰竞争利润高17%-22%，并模拟了合并带来的协调效应。
We study a repeated game of price leadership in which a firm proposes supermarkups over Bertrand prices to a coalition of rivals. Supermarkups and marginal costs are recoverable from data on prices and quantities using the model’s structure. In an application to the beer industry, we find that price leadership increases profit relative to Bertrand competition by 17 percent in fiscal years 2006 and 2007, and by 22 percent in 2010 and 2011, with the change mostly due to consolidation. We simulate two mergers, which relax binding incentive compatibility constraints and increase supermarkups. These coordinated effects arise even with efficiencies that offset price increases under Bertrand competition.