An oligopoly (from the Greek, few sellers) is a market that is dominated by a few large and powerful players. As Steve Hannaford documents with numerous examples, virtually every industry today—from medical equipment to airlines, toy retailing to oil—is trending in this direction, in the greatest movement toward industry consolidation since the turn of the 20th century. Charting the course of this trend around the world, Hannaford examines the motivations behind consolidation resulting from mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, and alliances; how companies exert political pressure to their advantage; and how the actions of the most dominant players—such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Viacom, Dell, ExxonMobil, Citigroup, and others—affect the choices we make at the supermarket, the drugs we are prescribed, and the movies we watch. Everyone who reads the newspapers is aware of the dizzying pace of mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, and alliances, between big companies and small companies in every industry. Such deals, along with the growing social and political clout of the biggest companies, are critical issues for the economy and for our future as consumers. Charting the course of this trend around the world, Hannaford examines the motivations behind consolidation into corporate empires, how companies exert political pressure to their advantage, and how the actions of the most dominant players, such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Viacom, Dell, ExxonMobil, Citigroup, and others, affect the choices we have at the supermarket, the drugs we are prescribed, and the movies we watch. Considering the implications of industry concentration on competition, technological innovation, business management, strategy, consumer behavior, and politics, Hannaford paints a provocative, but ultimately balanced, picture of big business and its impact on society.

This book constructs an innovative theoretical analysis framework for corporate consolidation through M&A under the condition of government competition during the transition period. Under the condition of transitional economy, the government is an important agent in economic development. Government behaviors, especially government competitions, are institutional variables that affect enterprise behaviors and corporate consolidation. Based on the perspective of local government competition, starting from the essential problems of China's enterprise M&A during the transition period, and taking “the existence of M&A waves-the occurrence mechanism of M&A under government competition-the process of corporate consolidation under government competition—the macro and micro effects of M&A” as the main line, this book reveals the mechanism and effects of enterprise M&A on the evolution of industrial economic structure and regional economic structure under the paradigm of government competition. At the same time, taking “the motivations for government competition-conducts of government competition-effects of government competition” as the hidden line, the path of government competition and its impact mechanism are investigated. Relevant analysis of government competition is embodied in the logical framework of M&A and corporate consolidation.

An indispensable guide to strategic best practices for business mergers Thirteen years ago, the experts at A. T. Kearney embarked on a landmark, worldwide study of business mergers. Encompassing 25,000 companies across 24 industries in 53 countries, the study revealed much crucial information that was previously unknown about business consolidation. This book shares those revelations and insights with senior executives, consultants, and industry analysts involved in the merger process. More important, it builds on those findings to present readers with a solid game plan for winning the consolidation game. Readers learn about the consolidation cycles through which industries pass, how to identify where in the cycle their industry currently lies, how to leverage that knowledge in determining which organizational changes they need to make and when they need to make them, and how to develop and deploy the most successful merger strategies.

What happens when electric utility monopolies pursue their acquisition interests—undisciplined by competition, and insufficiently disciplined by the regulators responsible for replicating competition? Since the mid-1980s, mergers and acquisitions of U.S. electric utilities have halved the number of local, independent utilities. Mostly debt-financed, these transactions have converted retiree-suitable investments into subsidiaries of geographically scattered conglomerates. Written by one of the U.S.’s leading regulatory thinkers, this book combines legal, accounting, economic and financial analysis of the 30-year march of U.S. electricity mergers with insights from the dynamic field of behavioral economics.

This graduate text develops production theory from a set of reasonable axioms. The theory is presented both in a primal and dual as well as in an indirect (constrained) framework. The basic model leads to a set of efficiency measures which can be readily employed in empirical work. A first draft of the text was used to teach students at Vanderbilt University. The text includes a variety of exercise problems.