To ascertain: Whether the merger of Firm 2 with Firm 3 will result in precompetitive or anticompetitive, and explain.

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Chapter 16, Problem 2E

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To ascertain: Whether the merger of Firm 2 with Firm 3 will result in precompetitive or anticompetitive, and explain.

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An industry is composed of Firm 1, which controls 70 percent of the market, Firm 2 with 15 percent of the market, and Firm 3 with 5 percent of the market. About 20 firms of approximately equal size divide the remaining 10 percent of the market. Calculate the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index before and after the merger of Firm 2 and Firm 3 (assume that the combined market share after the merger is 20 percent). Would you view a merger of Firm 2 with Firm 3 as procompetitive or anticompetitive? Explain.

Consider a market with four firms. Suppose the first firm has a 39% market share, the second firm has a 30% market share, the third firm has a 20% market share, and the fourth firm has a 11% market share. Using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), what is this market's level of concentration? Now suppose the third and fourth firms propose to merge. Were they to merge, then the market's HHI would increase to? Given the increase in the HHI that would be caused by the proposed merger, would the government likely allow such a merger to occur?

Based only on the knowledge that the premerger market share of two firms proposing to merge was 30 percent each, an economist working for the Justice Department was able to determine that, if approved, the postmerger HHI would increase by 1,800. How was the economist able to draw this conclusion without knowledge of the other firms’ market shares? From this information, can you devise a general rule explaining how the Herfindahl-Hirschman index is affected when exactly two firms in the market merge?