Technology of upstream firms and equilibrium product differentiation

Using a Hotelling-type product differentiation model (linear city model), we investigate the location strategies of upstream and downstream firms. We show that when transport costs of upstream firms are large, higher transport costs decrease the level of product differentiation of downstream firms. We also show that more inefficient transport technologies of upstream firms may enhance welfare. We briefly discuss vertical mergers and show that vertical mergers occur if the transport costs of upstream firms are large enough.     

The hidden costs of outsourcing: evidence from patent data

Drawing on patent data for approximately 500 firms over 20 years, we advance recent theory on firm boundaries and test these propositions for the first time. We first provide evidence for the existence of knowledge complementarities between vertically related activities in a firm's value chain by showing that firms face increasing (decreasing) performance in conducting downstream activities (i.e., patent litigation) the less (more) they outsource related upstream activities (i.e., patent filing). We then propose and empirically demonstrate that vertical integration benefits through learning differ from vertical outsourcing costs through forgetting. We show that firms can partly offset these hidden outsourcing costs by sourcing similar upstream products from internal and external suppliers. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Vertical integration and innovation

Innovation is a driving force for most industries, where it moreover affects many stages of the vertical chain. We study the impact of vertical integration on innovation in an industry where firms need to undertake risky R&D investments at both production and distribution stages. Vertical integration brings better coordination within the integrated firm, which boosts its investment incentive at both upstream and downstream levels. However, it is only mutually beneficial for firms to integrate when both upstream and downstream innovations are important. When innovation is irrelevant at one level, firms favor instead vertical separation. The analysis provides insights for the wave of mergers and R&D outsourcing observed in the pharmaceutical industry and other vertically related industries.     

VERTICAL CONTRACTING WHEN COMPETITION FOR ORDERS PRECEDES PROCUREMENT*

This paper reverses the standard order between input supply negotiations and downstream competition and assumes that competition for orders takes place prior to procurement of inputs in a vertical chain. It is found that oligopolistically competitive outcomes will result despite the presence of an upstream monopolist. Here, vertical integration is a means by which the monopolist can leverage its market power downstream to the detriment of consumers. However, it does so, not by foreclosing on independent downstream firms, but by softening the competitive behaviour of its own integrated units.     

VERTICAL INTEGRATION AND SHARED FACILITIES IN UNREGULATED INDUSTRIES

In this paper we analyze the equilibrium market structure, following liberalization, of an industry involving an essential facility. Two alternative modes of market entry are considered, in conjunction with vertical integration, namely: (i) full entry, which means building a new and more efficient facility at a positive fixed cost; and (ii) partial entry, which means purchasing existing capacity from the incumbent, at a fixed price per unit that is freely negotiated between the incumbent and the entrant. We show that vertical integration is a dominant strategy for each firm under either entry mode, and that upstream firms choose to share the incumbent's facility when the entrant's fixed cost exceeds a positive threshold. In addition, welfare analysis shows that in many situations the market can efficiently solve the trade-off between fixed-cost savings and softened downstream competition, thus providing a rationale for the liberalization of such industries. Several competition policy implications are discussed.     

Anticompetitive Vertical Merger Waves

We develop a model of vertical merger waves and use it to study the optimal merger policy. As a merger wave can result in partial foreclosure, it can be optimal to ban a vertical merger that eliminates the last unintegrated upstream firm. Such a merger is more likely to worsen market performance when the number of downstream firms is large relative to the number of upstream firms, and when upstream contracts are non‐discriminatory, linear and public. On the other hand, the optimal merger policy can be non‐monotonic in the strength of synergies or in the degree of downstream product differentiation.     

INNOVATION IN VERTICALLY RELATED MARKETS*

We examine the impact of vertical industry structure on upstream process innovation. We find that vertical integration (VI) generally enhances innovation under downstream Cournot competition, but can diminish innovation under downstream Bertrand competition. We also find that under Bertrand competition, VI can increase innovation when the direct incentives for innovation are limited, but can reduce innovation when the direct incentives are pronounced.     

A note on vertical integration as entry

This paper examines the incentive for an intermediate product monopolist to integrate forward into a competitively-structured final product industry when that industry has failed to achieve a position of long-run equilibrium. It is shown that the upstream monopolist's profits are increased more by entering the downstream industry than are the profits of other firms unrelated to this industry. Consequently, the monopolist is more likely to overcome whatever entry barriers might exist at the downstream stage. The welfare effects of this form of integration are shown to be positive, and a theoretical foundation is provided for the policy distinction commonly made between vertical integration by a major acquisition versus integration through internal expansion or a toehold acquisition followed by expansion.     

Vertical equilibrium in a competitive input market

Imperfect competition, imperfect information, disequilibrium, and rationing all induce vertical integration in relatively straightforward ways. But can vertical integration arise when firms are competitive and markets clear rapidly? This paper demonstrates that a vertical equilibrium can be generated when the intermediate market is subject to external fluctuations and when there are economies of coordination for firms which avoid the market via integration. The vertical equilibrium is one in which some firms will be integrated while some will not, despite the fact that all firms are identical. Thus, one need not conclude that differential degrees of integration within industries are the result of differing circumstances among firms.     

The impact of vertical integration on losses from collusion

Upstream collusion that increases the price of an input can harm an independent downstream producer (D). We ask whether this harm is more or less pronounced when D’s downstream rival is a vertically integrated producer. We find that such vertical integration increases D’s loss from collusion when D is not a particularly strong competitor. However, when D is a sufficiently strong competitor, vertical integration can reduce D’s loss from collusion when price competition prevails downstream.     

Strategy,structure and performance of major U. S. Oil companles: Evidence from line of business data

In this paper we assess the influence of size, market share, and vertical integration on upstream (oil and gas production) and downstream (refining and marketing) profit rates for twenty-five large petroleum companies. We use pooled time series and cross section line of business data collected by the Financial Reporting Service of the Energy Information Administration. We employ a fixed effects model which allows for firm specific characteristics and a proxy variable to control for firm efficiency. We find that firm structure has differential impacts on performance between upstream and downstream lines of business and that lending firms are differentially impacted by structural variables, compared to other firms in the industry. Firm specific factors are also found to be significant determinants of profit raten.     

Oligopoly intermediation,relative rivalry and market conduct

We consider two firms that compete against each other jointly in upstream and downstream markets under two pricing games: Purchasing to stock (PTS), in which firms select input prices prior to setting consumer prices; and purchasing to order (PTO), in which firms sell forward contracts to consumers prior to selecting input prices. The antitrust implications of the model depend on the relative degree of oligopoly rivalry in the upstream and downstream markets. Firms strategically precommit to setting prices in the less rivalrous market, which serves to soften competition in the more rivalrous market, resulting in anticompetitive effects. Bertrand prices emerge in equilibrium when the markets are equally rivalrous, while Cournot outcomes arise with upstream monopsony or downstream monopoly markets. The slope of firm reaction functions depends on relative rivalry, a feature we use to derive testable hypotheses for antitrust analysis of a wide variety of industry practices.     

Declared essential patents and average total R&D expenditures per patent family

The sharp increase in SEP declarations and declaring firms emphasizes the necessity for understanding firms’ innovation investment behavior in standardization. This paper empirically investigates whether declared standard-essential patents (SEPs) and the declaring firm’s business model (operationalized as a firm’s location in the value chain) are associated with a firm’s innovation investment behavior. To this end, we measure firms’ innovation investment behavior through average total research and development (R&D) expenditures per filed patent family for publicly listed firms from 1999 to 2018. Our sample mainly includes major SEP family declarants. We rely on a binary business model taxonomy differentiating upstream and downstream firms. Within that setting, total R&D expenditures rise with increasing fragmentation of declared SEP families, suggesting that firms adjust their R&D investments to declaration developments in standard-setting organizations (SSOs). We also show that upstream firms have significantly lower total R&D expenditures than downstream firms, which could indicate structural differences in their intellectual property (IP) and R&D management processes. Our results can help SSOs and regulators better understand firms’ innovation investment behavior.     

Differential Pricing in Intermediate Good Markets

This paper studies differential pricing by an upstream monopolist whose cost to supply the intermediate good differs across buyers in the downstream. It is shown that, different from demand‐based price discrimination, cost‐based differential pricing shifts production efficiently. If total output (and consumer welfare) is weakly increased under differential pricing as opposed to uniform pricing, as is true for weakly convex final market demand functions, social welfare is strictly improved. The analysis is extended to the case in which both the upstream monopolist's cost to serve the downstream firms and the downstream firms’ cost to produce the final good differ.     

Vertical Exclusion with Downstream Risk Aversion or Limited Liability

An upstream firm with full commitment bilaterally contracts with two ex ante identical downstream firms. Each observes its own cost shock, and faces uncertainty from its competitor’s shock. When they are risk neutral and can absorb losses, the upstream firm contracts symmetric outputs for production efficiency. However, when they are risk averse, competition requires the payment of a risk premium due to revenue uncertainty. Moreover, when they enjoy limited liability, competition requires the upstream firm to share additional surplus. To resolve these trade‐offs, the upstream firm offers exclusive contracts in many cases.     

Downstream mergers in vertically related markets with capacity constraints

Motivated by a recent merger proposal in the French outdoor advertising market, we develop a model in which firms are initially endowed with some advertising capacities and compete on two fronts. First, firms compete to acquire additional advertising capacities on an upstream market; a first stage modeled as a second-price auction with externalities. Second, those firms, privately informed on their own costs, use their capacities on the downstream market to supply advertisers whose demand is random; a second stage modeled by means of mechanism design techniques. We study the linkages between the equilibrium outcomes on both markets. When a firm is endowed with more initial capacity, through the acquisition of a competitor for instance, whether it becomes more or less eager to acquire extra capacity on the upstream market depends a priori on fine details of the downstream market. Under reasonable choices of functional forms, we demonstrate that a downstream merger does not create any bias in the upstream market towards the already dominant firm.     

Can Firms Benefit From Competition?

We typically assume that exit of competitors from an industry benefits those that remain. We show here that, when one accounts for the supply chain effects of exit, this need not be the case. Specifically, when exit downstream induces exit of upstream producers, input prices rise to the detriment of downstream firms. If mark-ups on inputs are large while downstream mark-ups are small, then exit of downstream competitors reduces the profits of non-exiting firms. We show that this result is quite general and argue that it has application beyond competition policy, being especially apt in the area of industry dynamics.     

VERTICAL MERGERS AND PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION*

This paper presents an equilibrium theory of vertical mergers that incorporates strategic behaviors in the Hotelling‐type location model. This enables one to consider the relationship between downstream firms' strategies for product differentiation and vertical integration. I show that vertical integration enhances the degree of product differentiation of the integrated firm. Under some conditions, partial integration arises in equilibrium, which may increase the profit of the nonintegrated downstream firm. The paper also discusses the welfare implications of vertical integration.     

Regulation, Vertical Integration and Sabotage

We consider the incentive of a dominant firm that supplies a necessary input to a Bertrand-competitive differentiated products downstream industry to: (1) vertically integrate forward, and (2) raise its downstream rivals' costs through non-price activities which we characterize generally as 'sabotage'. We examine these incentives both in the absence and presence of a regulatory constraint on the upstream price. We find that, while an incentive for vertical integration is present regardless of the existence of the regulatory constraint, the incentive for sabotage emerges only in the presence of binding input price regulation. Welfare effects are also explored.     

A competition‐based explanation of collaborative invention within the firm

Existing literature shows that collaborative invention within the firm enhances innovativeness by facilitating knowledge recombination. Despite such benefit, firms vary in their use of collaborative invention when drawing on their individual inventors' knowledge. In addressing this puzzle, we argue that competition from rival products building on similar knowledge compels firms to favor search depth over exploratory search and respond expeditiously, thus reducing a firm's inclination toward collaborative invention. In contrast with prior research's focus on how upstream resources influence a firm's position in downstream markets, this study shows that downstream competition drives heterogeneity across firms in their utilization of upstream resources. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.