Buyer Size and Bargaining Power:

* The authors would like to thank David Sappington and Simon Wilkie for very helpful comments on an earlier draft and Louis Eisenberg, Ching-Hua, Chen-Ritzo, and Ethan Silvers for technical assistance. The views contained in this study are the authors ’ and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Communications Commission. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) initiated a proceeding in 2002 to examine whether and to what extent cable operators should be limited in the number of subscribers they can serve. This paper reports on the performance of experimental (laboratory) markets designed to be similar in structure and practice to the market where cable operators negotiate affiliate fees with various programming networks. Funded by the FCC, these experiments examined whether different levels of market concentration among cable operators will lead to substantially different outcomes along a variety of performance measures. One important performance measure is whether programming networks are negatively affected by different levels of cable concentration. Key words: market concentration; cable operators; concentratio