What is the difference between vertical and horizontal integration?

Answer 1

Horizontal integration is the process of merging similar industries, industries that produce similar products. Vertical integration is the process of buying out suppliers of that particular industry.

The main difference is that horizontal integration buys the competing companies while vertical integration aims at the raw material sources necessary to produce that product

Answer 2

When you are given a shape on a two-dimensional plane, we take the integral to find the area. When we take the area, we slice the shape into rectangles like we would slice a (two-dimensional) loaf of bread. Then we add the area of all the rectangles together to get the area of the shape.

We have two choices--we could make the height of these rectangles a vertical measurement (parallel to the y axis), which means the integral would be taken in terms of x. Or we could make the height of the rectangles a horizontal measurement (parallel to the x axis), which means the integral would be in terms of y.

Technically you should be able to use both horizontal and vertical rectangles for each problem and get the same answer. But usually one method is easier to integrate. For example, if you want to find the area between the graph y = x2 and the x axis (which is the line y = 0), everything is already in terms of x ("y" doesn't describe the line; "x2" describes the line). In that case we would put the integral in terms of x--we would be integrating using vertical rectangles.

Of course we could rewrite the equation as x = sqrt(y), so that the equation is in terms of y ("hence the x=SomethingWithYInIt"), but then the integral would have a square root in it, which is harder to integrate.