Internal versus External Growth in Industries with Scale Economies: A Computational Model of Optimal Merger Policy

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. We thank John Asker, Dennis Carlton, Alan Collard-Wexler, Uli Doraszelski, Gautam Gowrisankaran, Ariel Pakes and Patrick Rey for their comments, as well as seminar audiences at Bates White, Chicago, ECARES, Harvard, NYU, Penn, Stanford, Toulouse, UCLA, the 2012 Northwestern Searle Antitrust conference, the 2012 SciencesPo Workshop on Dynamic Models in IO, the 2013 CRESSE Conference, the 2013 NBER IO Summer Institute, the 2013 EARIE conference, the 2013 SFB-TR15 Meeting, and the 2013 Annual Meeting of the IO section of the German Economic Association. Mermelstein and Satterthwaite thank the General Motors Research Center for Strategy and Management at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management for financial support. Nocke gratefully acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant 313623). Whinston thanks the National Science Foundation and the Toulouse Network for Information Technology for financial support. Note: General Motors provided an endowment for the Center about 1980 and exercises no control over the research that the Center supports.