Economic development and structure of agricultural co-operative unions in Greece

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D87820 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Advertising, concentration and profitability in Greek food manufacturing industries

The conventional framework for cross-sectional studies of industrial organisation focuses on the hypothesised relations among structure, conduct and performance (SCP). This paper investigates these relationships for the food and beverage manufacturing industries in a European country, i.e., Greece. 3SLS method is used to estimate the parameters of the profitability, concentration and advertising model for a sample of 38 four-digit industries in 1994. The main results, which are in line with the relevant empirical work, show that profitability is determined by advertising, which, in tum, is affected by both profitability and concentration, while the latter is determined by economies of scale. © 1998 Elsevier Science B. V

Efficiency and Market Power in Greek Food Industries

This paper uses firm level data to examine the market power versus efficiency hypothesis by taking into consideration both the long-run behavior of profitability and the possible endogeneity bias among profitability, market share, and advertising variables. In a sample of 266 Greek food manufacturing firms in the period 1987–95, two-stage least-squares results show both a direct effect of firm characteristics and an indirect effect of industry characteristics on profitability which do not provide support for the efficiency hypothesis alone but they do show that profitability is affected by both firm and industry variables. Copyright 2000, Oxford University Press.

Profitability and product differentiation in Greek food industries

This paper explains the increasing difference between the profit margins of differentiated and undifferentiated Greek food manufacturing industries between 1988 and 1994, using panel data. The 2SLS results for the fixed effects model show important differences across the high, medium and low differentiated industry groups. The increasing difference between the margins of the highly differentiated group - which includes the most profitable industries - and the other groups can be mainly attributed to the greater sensitivity of margins in differentiated industries to advertising and demand changes.

A chain oligopoly model of merger strategies and competition

Competition along an agri-food chain is analysed with the use of a chain oligopoly model. This model includes an oligopoly facing an oligopsony, which are solved simultaneously. The results of standard industrial organization models are altered when oligopoly-oligopsony is modelled simultaneously. Verifying the countervailing power hypothesis, it is shown that it is not always profitable to exercise market power when there are firms with market power on the other side of the market. It is also shown that there are more powerful incentives for vertical than horizontal mergers in the case of chain oligopolies. The merger between MD FOODS and KLØVER MAELK in Denmark highlights several of the issues involved