EBINA TAKESHI    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Commerce    Position   Professor
Language	English
Publication Date	2014/04
Type	Academic Journal
Peer Review	Peer reviewed
Title	"Complementing Cournot's Analysis of Complements: Unidirectional Complementarity and Mergers", Journal of Economics
Contribution Type	Co-authored (other than first author)
Journal	Journal of Economics
Journal Type	Another Country
Publisher	Springer
Volume, Issue, Page	111(3),pp.239-261
Author and coauthor	Takanori Adachi and Takeshi Ebina
Details	We study the price and welfare effects of a merger of firms producing unidirectional complements: a firm is producing a product (called an optional good) that is valuable only if it is consumed with the other product (called a base good) produced by another firm. Under the assumption that there are two types of consumers: (i) those who consume one unit of the base good only or nothing (having zero valuation of the optional good), and (ii) those who consume one unit of the composite good or nothing, we show that a merger of the two firms raises the price of the base good, resulting in lower consumer surplus for the former consumer group, if and only if the average willingness to pay in the latter consumer group is sufficiently low. This result is in sharp contrast to Cournot's (Researches into the mathematical principles of the theory of wealth, 1838) classical implication that a merger of firms producing strict complements makes all consumers strictly better off.
URL for researchmap	https://researchmap.jp/ebinatakeshi2010/