Tag: Oligopoly

Price Leadership in the Beer Market

InBev’s St. Louis production line for Stell Artois beer. Photo from the Wall Street Journal

Firms in an oligopoly can increase their profits by agreeing with other firms in the industry on what prices to charge. Explicit price fixing violates the antitrust laws and can subject the firms involved to fines of up to $100 million and executives at the firms to fines of up to $1 million and prison terms of up to 10 years. Despite these penalties, the rewards to avoiding price competition are often so great that firms look for ways to implicitly collude—that is, to arrange ways to coordinate their prices without violating the law by explicitly agreeing on the prices to charge. (We discuss the antitrust laws in Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 15, Section 15.6.) 

One way for firms to implicitly collude is through price leadership. With price leadership, one firm in the industry takes the lead in announcing a price change that other firms in the industry then match. (We briefly discuss price leadership in Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 14, Section 14.2.)

In their classic industrial organization textbook, F.M. Scherer of Harvard’s Kennedy School and David Ross of Bryn Mawr College summarize the legal status of price leadership, given court opinions from antitrust cases: “[P]rice leadership is not apt to be found contrary to the antitrust laws unless the leader attempts to coerce other producers into following its lead, or unless there is evidence of an agreement among members of the industry to use the leadership device as the basis of a price-fixing scheme.” As the Federal Trade Commission notes on its website: “A uniform, simultaneous price change could be the result of price fixing, but it could also be the result of independent business responses to the same market conditions.”

Scherer and Ross describe price leadership in a number of oligopolistic industries during the twentieth century, including cigarettes, steel, automobiles, breakfast cereals, turbogenerators, and gasoline.

Recently, Nathan Miller of Georgetown University, Gloria Sheu of the Federal Reserve, and Matthew Weinberg of Ohio State University published an article in the American Economic Review analyzing price leadership in the beer industry. They focus on the period from 2001 to 2011, although they believe that conditions in the beer industry are similar today. From 2001 to 2007, three large U.S.-based firms—Anheuser-Busch, SABMiller, and Molson Coors—accounted for about two-thirds of beer sales in the United States. Two importers—Heineken and Grupo Modelo—accounted for about 14 percent of sales.  In 2008, SABMiller and Molson Coors combined to form MillerCoors and InBev—which had a small market share—bought Anheuser Busch. In 2011, MillerCoors and InBev together accounted for 63 percent of beer sales.

ABI has acted as the price leader, announcing prices in the late summer that MillerCoors typically matches. ABI’s Bud Light had the largest market share among beers in the United States in 2011, well ahead of Coors Light, which had the second largest share. They find that industry profits were 17 percent above the competitive level in 2007—just before the Miller-Coors merger—and 22 percent above the competitive level in 2010—after the merger. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) had decided not to contest the Miller-Coors merger because “cost savings in distribution likely would offset any loss of competition.” As it turned out, the cost savings occurred but their value was smaller than the losses in consumer surplus resulting from reduced competition.

The authors estimate that, compared with the competitive outcome, the reduction in consumer surplus in the beer market due to price leadership equaled 154 of the increase in producer surplus before the Miller-Coors merger and 170 percent after it. Figure 15.5 from Chapter 15 of Microeconomics (reproduced below) illustrates why the loss of consumer surplus is larger than the increase in producer surplus: The increase in price and decline in quantity compared with the competitive level results in a deadweight loss that reduces the total economic surplus in the market. (Note that the figure is comparing the situation when a market is monopoly with the situation when the market is perfectly competitive. For simplicity, we are assuming that price leadership in an oligopolistic industry, such as beer, results in the monopoly outcome. But note that whenever collusive behavior, like price leadership, occurs in an industry, we would expect an increase in deadweight loss that will make the gains to firms larger than the losses to consumers.)

Sources: Federal Trade Commission, “Price Fixing,” ftc.gov; U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, “Price Fixing, Bid Rigging, and Market Allocation Schemes: What They Are and What to Look for,” justice.gov; Nathan H. Miller, Gloria Sheu, and Matthew C. Weinberg, “Oligopolistic Price Leadership and Mergers: The United States Beer Industry,” American Economic Review, Vol. 111, No. 10, pp. 3123-3159; and F.M Scherer and David Ross, Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance, Third edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Streaming Conquers the Music Industry

Listening to recorded music seems like a basic, uncomplicated activity, but as we discuss in the opening to Chapter 14, few markets have been as disrupted by technological change over the years as the market for recorded music.  The following graph shows the distribution of revenue received by firms in the recording industry by type of music format. The data are first available for 1973. 

From the 1930s to the mid-1960s, nearly all recorded music was sold on vinyl records. In the 1960s, 8-track tapes began to compete with vinyl records. In 1973, recording companies received about 71 percent of their revenue from selling vinyl records, 24 percent from selling 8-track tapes, and 5 percent from selling cassette tapes. Cassette tapes became increasingly popular after Sony introduced the Walkman, a portable cassette player, in 1979.  The popularity of cassettes contributed to a sharp decline in sales of vinyl records.  The share of vinyl records in revenue received from sales of recorded music dropped from 71 percent in 1975 to only 2 percent in 1990. The greater portability of cassette tapes was a significant advantage over 8-track tapes, which were most frequently used in players built into automobiles. By 1983, 8-track tapes had largely disappeared from the market.

The introduction of digital compact discs (CDs) in the early 1980s ended the rapid rise in sales of cassette tapes. By the end of the 1980s, sales of cassette tapes began to decline rapidly and their share of the market had fallen to less than 2 percent by the early 2000s. 

As discussed in the opening to Chapter 14, the development by engineers in Germany of the MP3 file format made it possible to store the contents of a music CD on a file small enough to be downloaded from the internet. Apple’s opening its iTunes online music store in 2003 increased sales of music downloads, which peaked at 40 percent of the market in 2012. In that year, recording companies earned about 8 percent of their revenue from payments from streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music.

Steaming music has become increasingly popular and by 2020, 75 percent of industry revenue was earned from streaming. Ten percent was earned from “sound exchange,” which refers to revenue recording companies receive when music is used in a movie, television series, advertisement, or online video. (Some industry analysts consider sound exchange to be a form of streaming. Using that definition raises streaming’s share to 85 percent of the market.) Downloads had a market share of only 5 percent, about the same as the share of vinyl records, which had increased from a low point of less than 1 percent in 2007. CD sales continue to slowly decline and make up about 4 percent of the market. 

In Chapter 14, we discuss the streaming market as an example of oligopolistic competition.  When a market expands as rapidly as music streaming has, competition can be less intense because it’s possible for firms to increase their revenue as the market expands without having to attract customers from competitors. Typically when a market matures and the increase in total revenue levels off, competition can become more intense. We may see that development in the market for streaming music in coming years.

Source: Data from Recording Industry Association of America, “U.S. Sales Database.”