Formulation and analysis of horizontal mergers among oligopolistic firms with insights into the merger paradox: a supply chain network perspective

In this paper, we consider oligopolistic firms with supply chain networks who are involved in the production, storage, and distribution of a homogeneous product to demand markets and explore what has become known in the literature as the “merger paradox.” We present the oligopolistic supply chain network equilibrium model associated with the competing firms before the horizontal mergers and also develop the supply chain network optimization model post the complete merger. In addition, we develop the model in which only a subset of the firms in the industry merge. The governing concept of the competing firms is that of Cournot-Nash equilibrium. We utilize finite-dimensional variational inequality theory for the formulation, analysis, and solution of both the pre and the post-merger supply chain network problems. We provide numerical examples for which we compute the total costs, the total revenues, as well as the profits obtained for the firms pre and post the mergers for a variety of distinct oligopoly problems. The generality of the network models and the flexibility of the computational approach, which yields closed form expressions for the product flows at each iteration, allows us to obtain deeper insights into the merger paradox. This paper may be viewed as a contribution to the marriage of frameworks in operations research/management science and computational economics.