纵向合约与相关市场界定:来自中国乘用车市场的证据

Vertical Contracts and Related Market Definition:Evidence from the Chinese Automobile Market

如何界定相关市场是反垄断分析的重要研究问题。本文探讨纵向合约如何通过成本传递率对相关市场界定产生影响。基于中国乘用车市场背景,利用新实证产业组织研究方法,对于不同纵向合约如何通过成本传递影响相关市场界定进行实证研究。实证结果表明:线性定价下的成本传递率较低,一旦忽略成本不完全传递可能会低估制造商的利润率,进而导致相对较大的相关市场界定范围;在非线性合约下,较高的成本传递率不会对上游相关市场界定产生影响,界定相关市场时可以忽略上下游企业间的纵向合约。本文的启示是在成本不完全传递特征较为突出的市场中进行相关市场界定时,需要充分考虑纵向合约的作用。

How to define the relevant market is an important research issue in antitrust analysis.This paper considers the impact of cost pass-through on market definition from the perspective of vertical market structure.Based on the background of Chinese automobile market,using the new empirical industrial organization research method,this paper conducts an empirical study on how different vertical contracts affect the market definition through cost pass-through.The empirical results show that the linear pricing contract will produce a low cost pass-through rate,if incomplete cost pass-through is ignored,manufacturers’profit margins may be underestimated,which leads to a relatively large range of relevant market definition.Under nonlinear contracts,higher cost pass-through has no effect on the definition of upstream related market,and vertical market structure can be ignored when defining related market.The implication of this paper is that the role of vertical market structure should be taken into full consideration when defining relevant markets in markets with prominent features of incomplete cost pass-through.