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Critical Efficiencies as Upward Pricing Pressure with Feedback Effects

  • Bertram Neurohr EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: October 14, 2017

Abstract

Farrell and Shapiro’s upward pricing pressure (‘UPP’) is widely used in merger analysis due to its intuitiveness, despite not accounting for the interdependence between the merging firms’ pricing incentives (‘feedback effects’). However, ignoring feedback effects can have an impact on the way competition authorities rank mergers. The main result of this article is that UPP with feedback effects is equivalent to Werden’s critical efficiencies. Importantly, this link allows for the derivation of an expression that combines the intuition of UPP as the ‘value of diverted sales’ with the accuracy of critical efficiencies. Throughout, the focus is on the static unilateral effects of horizontal mergers with differentiated Bertrand competition.

Acknowledgments

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. The author would like to thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments.

References

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Published Online: 2017-10-14

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