Do Consumers Benefit from Concentration in the New Economy? - A Review of Google's Mergers, Acquisitions, and Arrangements

28 Pages Posted: 7 Feb 2009

See all articles by Patrick Beschorner

Patrick Beschorner

ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Date Written: 2008

Abstract

Within the last three years, Google has acquired YouTube and DoubleClick and has attempted to control part of Yahoo!'s search advertising business. Two of the deals have not raised antitrust concerns by competition authorities. I review these deals with a focus on consumer welfare. Consumers are affected by being on one side of a multisided platform. Provided that better matches of search ads are beneficial, I demonstrate that the mergers may have positive effects for consumers through better matches between users and search ads. However, this does not substitute an in-depth antitrust assessment of the deals.

Keywords: merger control, multisided platforms, screening mechanism

JEL Classification: L41, L42, K21, M37

Suggested Citation

Beschorner, Patrick, Do Consumers Benefit from Concentration in the New Economy? - A Review of Google's Mergers, Acquisitions, and Arrangements (2008). ZEW - Centre for European Economic Research Discussion Paper No. 08-121, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1338760 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1338760

Patrick Beschorner (Contact Author)

ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research ( email )

P.O. Box 10 34 43
L 7,1
D-68034 Mannheim, 68034
Germany

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