Common ownership and information exchange in a duopoly

Abstract

I analyze effects of common ownership or cross-ownership on the incentives of Cournot competitors with close substitutes to exchange perfectly correlated information. Consistent with empirical findings, firms have stronger incentives to exchange information for greater degrees of common ownership. There is a trade-off for consumers. On the one hand, more common ownership relaxes competition, which hurts consumers. On the other hand, more common ownership may yield more information exchange, which benefits consumers. Consequently, positive degrees of common ownership may maximize the expected consumer (and total) surplus.