I finished my doctorate in 2024 and am now a postdoctoral researcher at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. I will be visiting the Toulouse School of Economics in October and November 2024, and I was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Economics at Harvard University in 2023.

My research is in the field of industrial organization with intersections to other fields such as competition law, managerial economics, quantitative marketing and macroeconomics.

I will be on the Job Market 2024/25.

Curriculum Vitae | Department website | Bluesky | Twitter/X | Google Scholar | ORCID

Cross-Category Mergers in US Retailing

Conglomerates, whose product portfolios span many product categories and sometimes sectors, are an important part of today's economy. The emergence of these firms is closely linked to mergers where the merging firms operated in different product categories before the merger. I analyze 57 of these cross-category mergers in the US consumer packaged goods industry. My analysis focuses on the target firms that are usually taken over by large acquirers. I show that cross-category mergers can affect their sales, but this effect does not occur on average and is linked to heterogeneity in merger cases. Acquirers and target firms rely on the same retailers to sell their products to consumers, and if the acquirer generated larger sales at a retailer before the merger, the target firm benefits from increased sales at that retailer. Conversely, if the target firm had larger pre-merger sales, it experiences a negative sales effect. I show that the sales effect is due to a quantity effect and not a price effect. I relate the retailer-specific effect to a region-specific effect and use a theoretical model to discuss how merging firms can better utilize their logistics infrastructure after the merger.

Rising Markups and the Role of Consumer Preferences

Joint with Alexander MacKay, Nathan Miller and Joel Stiebale

Accepted at Journal of Political Economy [Link to SSRN | Link to NBER]

We characterize the evolution of markups for consumer products in the United States from 2006 to 2019. Using detailed data on prices and quantities for products in more than 100 distinct product categories, we estimate flexible demand systems and recover markups under an assumption that firms set prices to maximize profit. Our empirical strategy obtains a panel of consumer preferences and marginal costs based on the estimation of separate random coefficient models by category and year. We find that markups increased by about 30 percent on average over the sample period. The change is primarily attributable to decreases in marginal costs, as real prices only increased slightly from 2006 to 2019. Our estimates indicate that consumers have become less price sensitive over time.

Media coverage: Harvard Gazette (by Christina Pazzanese), Time (Magazin) (by Alana Semuels), Quartz (by Clarisa Diaz), New York Times (article 2) (by Lydia DePillis), Harvard Business Manager (German, via Manager Magazin), New York Times (article 1) (by Lydia DePillis), Coupons in the News, HBS Working Knowledge (by Rachel Layne), Marginal Revolution (by Tyler Cowen)

Mentioned in policy report: OECD on “Competition and Inflation” (2022)

Award: Robert F. Lanzillotti Prize for the best paper in antitrust economics (IIOC 2022)

Combinable Products, Price Discrimination, and Collusion

Joint with Alexander Rasch

International Journal of Industrial Organization (2024) [Link to published version]

We analyze the effect of different pricing schemes on the ability of horizontally differentiated firms to sustain collusion when customers are able to mix products to achieve a better match of their preferences. We compare the impacts on the likelihood of collusion and on consumer welfare from three pricing schemes: two-part tariffs, linear prices, and quantity-independent fixed fees. We find that a ban of either price component of the two-part tariff makes it more difficult to sustain collusion at profit-maximizing prices. We also find that whereas linear pricing is the most beneficial pricing schedule for customers in the absence of collusion, it is the most harmful pricing schedule for customers in the presence of collusion.

A Bargaining Perspective on Vertical Integration

Joint with Geza Sapi (DG Comp, European Commission) and Christian Wey

Canadian Journal of Economics (2024) [Link to published version]

We analyze vertical integration incentives in a bilaterally duopolistic industry with bargaining in the input market. Vertical integration incentives are a combination of horizontal integration incentives upstream and downstream and depend on the strength of substitutability and complementarity and the shape of the unit cost function. Under particular circumstances, vertical integration can convey more bargaining power to the merged entity than a horizontal merger to monopoly. In a bidding game for an exogenously determined target firm, a vertical merger can dominate a horizontal one, while pre-emption does not occur.

Hendrik Döpper

Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics

Heinrich Heine University

Building 24.31 Room 01.43

Universitätsstraße 1

40225 Düsseldorf

Germany

Phone: +49 211 81-10068 (redirects to mobile if I am not in the office)

Email: contact@doepper.com

Impressum/Legal Notice (German and English) | Datenschutzerklärung/Privacy Policy (German and English)