Can Potential Vertical Integration Harm Be (Silver) Screened Horizontally? Empirical Answers From the Chinese Film Industry

Senior Economist Shilong Sun and co-author Charles Hodgson joined the American Bar Association’s Our Curious Amalgam podcast to discuss their NBER working paper, “Heterogeneity in Vertical Foreclosure: Evidence from the Chinese Film Industry.”

They unpack how industry machine learning algorithms, combined with massive consumer product rating datasets, can be used to inform substitution patterns; how downstream market competition and upstream product substitutability may predict harmful vertical integration in their empirical setting; what the natural experiments arising from movie releases and new theater entry can reveal about when foreclosure harm materializes; and what lessons enforcers and practitioners can draw from the empirical results.

The views expressed in this podcast are the sole responsibility of the participants and cannot be attributed to Compass Lexecon or any other parties.