RIEB Seminar (Jointly supported by: Rokko Forum)

Date&Time Friday, June 3, 2011, 3:30pm-
Place Seminar Room at RIEB (Kanematsu Memorial Hall 1st Floor)
Intended Audience Faculty, Graduate Students, and People with Equivalent Knowledge
Language English
Note Copies of the paper are available at Office of Promoting.

3:30pm-

Speaker Ngo Van LONG
Affiliation Department of Economics, McGill University/Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies, Kobe University
Topic Strategic Separation from Suppliers of Vital Complementary Inputs: Toward a theory of vertical disintegration
Abstract In a model where a monopolistic downstream firm (assembler) negotiates simultaneously with each of its intermediate-input suppliers the prices of the complementary components which enter its product, we analyze the process by which the assembler separates from its suppliers as a Markov Perfect equilibrium. Due to a negative strategic effect (the prices and profits of independent suppliers decrease when their number increases), the assembler's marginal return from keeping an upstream subsidiary is lower than its market value as an independent supplier. Separation is immediate when the downstream firm's initial number of upstream subsidiaries is below a critical level. It is progressive in the reverse case and eventually leads to a mixed strategy whereby it keeps all the remaining subsidiaries with some probability, and sells all them off in one go with the complementary probability.