The past twenty years have witnessed the emergence of internet conglomerates fueled by acquisitions. We build a simple model of network formation to study this. Following the resource-based view of competitive advantage from the management literature we endow firms with scarce capabilities which drive their competitiveness across markets. Firms can merge to combine their capabilities, spin-off new firms by partitioning their capabilities, or procure unassigned capabilities. We study stable industry structures (stable networks) in which none of these deviations are profitable.

This paper provides experimental evidence on the economic determinants of intermediation networks by considering two pricing rules – respectively criticality and betweenness – and three group sizes of subjects – 10, 50 and 100 subjects. We find that when brokerage benefits accrue only to traders who lie on all paths of intermediation, stable networks involve interconnected cycles, and trading path lengths grow while linking and payoff inequality remain modest as the number of traders grows.