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The Williamson trade-off model is a theoretical model in the economics of industrial organization which emphasizes the trade-off associated with horizontal mergers between gains resulting from lower costs of production and the losses associated with higher prices due to greater degree of monopoly power.〔Robert Beynon, ("The Routledge critical dictionary of global economics" ), Taylor & Francis, 1999, p. 349〕 The model was first presented by Oliver Williamson in his 1968 paper "Economics as an Anti-Trust Defense: The welfare trade-offs" in the ''American Economic Review''.〔Williamson, Oliver, ("Economics as an Anti-Trust Defense: The welfare trade-offs" ), The ''American Economic Review'', Vol. 58, No. 1 (March 1968), pp. 18–36〕 Williamson argued that ignoring efficiencies that may result from proposed mergers in antitrust law "fail(ed) to meet the basic test of economic rationality".〔Katalin Judit Cseres, ("Competition law and consumer protection" ), Kluwer Law International, 2005, p. 139〕 ==Basic idea of the model== Suppose that a given industry is initially characterized by perfect competition and has a constant unit cost of production equal to ''c1'' (assumed the same across all firms in the industry). Because of competition, the market price of the good produced will be equal to this unit cost, which means that firms in the industry earn normal profits, as captured by the producer surplus (the area below the market price, but above the supply/unit cost curve).〔 Suppose further that after a merger between firms in the industry takes place, unit costs fall to ''c2 The change in overall social surplus of the market depends on whether the increase in producer surplus due to lower production costs is larger or smaller than the fall in consumer surplus due to higher prices. Note that it is theoretically possible that the fall in unit costs due to the merger could be sufficiently large that the post merger monopoly price ends up being lower than the pre merger competitive price in which case both producer and consumer surplus would increase. In that situation no trade-off exists and the merger is unambiguously beneficial to all market participants. More generally however, a horizontal merger can involve both costs and benefits.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Williamson trade-off model」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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