Component producers face the option to either merge with a similar component producer (horizontal merger) or a complementary one (vertical merger) of a composite good.
Deemed benign at worst, and more often beneficial, mergers involving complementary products attracted little antitrust attention.
At the time the terms were agreed upon, it was considered a best-of-breed merger combining complementary companies at a fair price.
Steven Ross, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism who conducts his own widely read survey of how journalists use the Internet, calls the two companies' businesses "very complementary" and says the merger was "a good idea for both companies".
In many places, this adaptation has resulted in a shift from the separation of conventional and complementary medicine to a "merger" of the two medicine fields [ 10].
We also conducted a literature search on merger and corporate culture theories using the terms role of corporate culture in merger, corporate culture in merger, professional culture, reasons for merger failures, merger of medical traditions, and fusion or merger of conventional and complementary medicine.
Worse yet, discrete management oversights that might have produced limited damage in earlier generations became systemic failures precisely because markets had been linked together in vertical mergers and other complementary transactions.
"The F.C.C. recognizes that this merger uniquely combines complementary assets that will generate enormous public interest benefits," and Ivan G. Seidenberg, chairman and chief executive of Bell Atlantic "We look forward to creating the next great brand in communications, one that will set the standard for global communications companies".
In this view, mergers between companies that offer complementary products (sometimes called "vertical" mergers)–AIG's commercial property insurance and Sun America's retirement instruments, as an example–merit not a moment's worth of attention because an acquisition in a related market rarely augments a company's ability to charge higher prices.
