NBER Working Papers by Justin Ho

Theoretical investigations have examined both anti-competitive and efficiency-inducing rationales for vertical bundling, making empirical evidence important to understanding its welfare implications. We use an extensive dataset on full-line forcing contracts between movie distributors and video retailers to empirically measure the impact of vertical bundling on welfare. We identify and measure three primary effects of fullline forcing contracts: market coverage, leverage, and efficiency. We find that bundling increases market coverage and efficiency, but has little impact on one distributor gaining leverage over another. As a result, we estimate that full-line forcing contracts increased consumer and producer surplus in this application.

We provide an empirical study of bundling in a supply chain, referred to as fullline forcing. We use an extensive dataset on contracts between video retailers and movie distributors to analyze the choices made on both sides of the market: which distributors offer full-line forcing contracts, which retailers take them up, and whether their decisions are profitable. Most large distributors offer full-line forcing contracts in our data. Our simulations indicate that their choices of which contracts to offer are profit-maximizing. However, many retailers prefer to utilize linear pricing contracts even when our model indicates that this may not be profit-maximizing.