COMPETITION AND PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION IN THE ARGENTINE CHOCOLATE BAR INDUSTRY.

This paper analyzes the behavior of the Argentine chocolate bar industry during the period 2019-2022. It mainly focuses on the level of competition between the firms in the industry, estimating conduct parameters that signal the existence of harder or softer competition. We first calculate a conduct parameter without taking into account the phenomenon of product differentiation, using two alternative specifications: linear and logarithmic. While the linear specification produces an estimation that is consistent with the absence of market power (i.e., perfect competition), the logarithmic specification generates a result which signals some kind of imperfect competition. This last result is reinforced when we explicitly model product differentiation at the level of the supplying firms. This new specification allows discarding the hypothesis of perfect competition and also the hypothesis of collusion, and it slightly favors the existence of quantity (Cournot) competition over price (Bertrand) competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]