António Miguel Costa

Abstract

Abstract
Recent years have witnessed an increased interest, by competition agencies, in assessing the competitive effects of partial acquisitions. We propose a generalization of the two most traditional indicators used to screen unilateral anti-competitive effects - the HerfindahlHirschman Index and the Gross Up- ward Price Pressure Index - to partial horizontal acquisition settings. The proposed generalized indicators are endogenously derived under a probabilistic voting model in which the manager of each firm is elected in a shareholder assembly between two potential candidates who seek to obtain utility from an exogenous rent associated with corporate office. The model (i) can cope with settings involving all types of owners and rights: owners that can be internal to the industry (rival firms) and external to the industry; and rights that can capture financial and corporate control interests, can be direct and indirect, can be partial or full, (ii) yields an endogenous measure of the owners ultimate corporate control rights, and (iii) can also be used - in case the potential acquisition is inferred to likely enhance market power - to devise divestiture structural remedies. We also provide an empirical application of the two proposed generalized indicators to several acquisitions in the wet shaving industry, with the objective of providing practitioners with a step-by-step illustration of how to compute them in antitrust cases.

Abstract

Abstract
In many economic situations, individuals with different bargaining power must agree on how to divide a given resource. For instance, in the dictator game the proposer has all the bargaining power. In spite of it, the majority of controlled experiments show that she shares an important amount of the resource with the receiver. In the present paper I consider how behavioural and psychological internal conflicting aspects, such as self-interest and equity concerns, determine the split of the resource. The individual allocation proposals are aggregated in terms of altruism and value for the resource under dispute to obtain a single allocation. The resulting allocation rule is generalized to the n-individuals case through efficiency and consistency. Finally, I show that it satisfies a set of desirable properties. The obtained results are of practical interest for a number of situations, such as river sharing problems, sequential allocation and rationing problems. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.

Abstract
In this paper, we consider a sequential allocation problem with n individuals. The first individual can consume any amount of a resource, leaving the remainder for the second individual, and so on. Motivated by the limitations associated with the cooperative or non-cooperative solutions, we propose a new approach from basic definitions of representativeness and equal treatment. The result is a unique asymptotic allocation rule for any number of individuals. We show that it satisfies a set of desirable properties. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.