Lowering the Barriers to Entry to the Common Ownership Debate: A (Relatively) Non-Technical Explanation of MHHI Delta

One of the hottest topics in antitrust these days is institutional investors’ common ownership of the stock of competing firms. Large investment companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and Fidelity offer index and actively managed mutual funds that are invested in thousands of companies. In many concentrated industries, these institutional investors are “intra-industry diversified,” meaning that they hold stakes in all the significant competitors within the industry. Recent empirical studies (e.g., here and here) purport to show that this intra-industry diversification has led to a softening of competition in concentrated markets. The theory is that firm managers seek to maximize the profits of their largest and most powerful shareholders, all of which hold stakes in all the major firms in the market and therefore prefer maximization of industry, not firm-specific, profits. (For example, an investor that owns stock in all the airlines servicing a…

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