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Market Definition For Media Mergers

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Competition, Efficiency, and Welfare
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Abstract

Media mergers have always created particular public concerns, most notably because of the political sensitivity of editorial control of the news and other channels of information. Recent technological developments have exacerbated these worries as they have encouraged multi-media, and large, international, vertical mergers, jointventures and other alliances. In part, the motivation behind them has been to exploit synergies between established enterprises with complementary expertise, and to share risk in uncertain emerging markets which require massive investments. However, either incidentally or by design, these alliances can create dominant positions and foreclose new entry. The purpose of this paper is to identify some principles of market definition as a prerequisite to being able to judge the competitive threat (widely defined) posed by such mergers and alliances. These principles are then used to appraise some relevant aspects of EU, German and UK policy.

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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Lyons, B.R. (1999). Market Definition For Media Mergers. In: Mueller, D.C., Haid, A., Weigand, J. (eds) Competition, Efficiency, and Welfare. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5559-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5559-9_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-7542-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-5559-9

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