New Evidence of Market Competition in the Japanese Tire Industry Using Market Share Analysis

摘要

We present a simple, yet powerful, battery of univariate and panel unit root tests on market shares to draw some inferences regarding the level of rivalry within an industry. As an application, we employ them on the Japanese tire industry over a 40-year period. We find that rivalry seems to be present among the smaller firms, while at the same time, the dominant firm seems unperturbed by the competition. We compare these conclusions with a previous study of the industry.