Diploma Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Economics - Micro-economics, grade: 2,0, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Wirtschaftstheorie II), course: VWL - Mikro?konomie, Industrial Organization, language: English, abstract: ...Farell and Shapiro state that there is no necessity for mergers as cooperation and coordination can be achieved at an equivalent level via contracts: "..., modern economic theory observes that virtually anything that can be done with a merger can in principle be done instead with some kind of contract, perhaps a very complex (or restrictive) one." (Farrell and Shapiro2001, p. 691)...6.2 Concluding Remarks...In the last section I introduce the strand of economic literature that deals with the process of mergers under uncertain efficiency gains. By introducing uncertain synergies to Cournot merger models the merger paradox can be solved in all above presented approaches and compared to the deterministic models there is a wider scope of profitable mergers. The informational asymmetry after the merger benefits the merger members although efficiency gains may be not obtained post merger. Thus mergers are more likely to be beneficial compared to the case where uncertain efficiency gains are not assumed. It has been shown that the incentives to merger coincide with the degree of uncertainty and when firms are aware of this uncertainty they are able to prepare for the post-merger integrationprocess much better since post-merger actions can be specif...