اتحاد استراتژیک، سرمایه گذاری های مشترک و ساختار بازار

This paper examines strategic alliances (SAs) involving joint investments in and sharing of production capacity. We consider a situation where market entry is limited by the availability of an essential production capacity. New capacity becomes sequentially available, and the incumbent firms may form a strategic alliance in order to jointly invest in it. In this setting, SAs may influence competition in the product market by affecting market entry. We characterize the evolution of the market structure. We also show that SAs need not be anticompetitive. That is, banning SAs may lead to a more concentrated market structure than what would otherwise be the case.

Even firms that compete fiercely in the product market are often able to cooperate outside it through strategic alliances (SAs).1 Important examples of strategic alliances are research joint ventures, joint investments in and sharing of plants and equipment, joint investments in exploration for natural resources, and sharing of licenses to produce or sell a new product. The concern that has been raised in connection with strategic alliances is their possible influence on competition in the product market. For instance, in the airline industry, SAs involving sharing of terminal space or landing slots have been suspected to have anticompetitive effects. Many of these SAs have received attention from antitrust agencies.2 The impact of SAs on competition in the product market has been theoretically analyzed in several papers. For instance, Cabral (2000) and Martin (1995) show that cooperation in R&D may facilitate collusive behavior in the product market and thereby reduce competition.3Chen and Ross (2000) show how strategic alliances involving capacity sharing may reduce competition by inducing an entrant to enter the market without investing in new production capacity. Morasch (2000) analyzes the influence of intermediate good production joint ventures on competition. In his model, SAs reduce competition in the product market unless several alliances are formed. A common feature of this literature is that the number of firms in the market is taken as given.4 However, if SAs influence profits of the incumbents, they should also influence the incentives to enter the market. This may have a large impact on competition. In this paper, we analyze how SAs affect market structure in a dynamic setting where threat of entry leads incumbents to form SAs. We build on the literature on preemptive investment. Within this literature, Lewis (1983), Krishna, 1993 and Krishna, 1999, and Rodriguez (2002) are the most closely related to our analysis. These papers consider a situation where market entry is limited by the availability of an essential production capacity. New capacity becomes sequentially available and is auctioned to an entrant or an incumbent. We use this framework to analyze strategic alliances. When new capacity becomes available the firms in the market may jointly acquire and share it while remaining otherwise independent. This is what we will call here a strategic alliance.5 We will first describe how the market structure and the price of new capacity evolve in the presence of SAs. When firms do not take future profits into account, the incumbents always buy new capacity units that become available. Thus, in a static set-up, SAs may only have anticompetitive effects. We then characterize the situation without SAs and show by means of a simple example that forbidding alliances may result in the final market structure being more concentrated than when SAs are allowed. In the absence of SAs, a single incumbent may find it profitable to deter entry alone. But when alliances are allowed, it may prefer to let some new units of capacity go to entrants and then buy the remaining units jointly with them. In other words, banning SAs may lead an incumbent to defend its market power more aggressively. In Section 2, we present the model and describe the equilibrium outcome. In Section 3, we consider some examples with and without SAs. We conclude in Section 4.

We have analyzed strategic alliances involving joint capacity acquisition. An often expressed concern is that SAs may have anticompetitive effects. While the previous literature has considered how SAs may influence competition among existing firms in a given product market, our focus has been on how SAs may influence competition by affecting the number of firms in the market. As our examples show, SAs may indeed affect the market structure this way. Furthermore, although in our model, the sole purpose of SAs is to facilitate entry deterrence, in some cases, banning SAs results to a more concentrated market structure than what would otherwise be the case. This result suggests that to determine whether a particular SA is anticompetitive, dynamic entry considerations should be taken into account. Consequently, it seems important to incorporate entry decisions into otherwise more elaborate analysis of strategic alliances.