Dynamic Efficiencies in Merger Analysis

This document (of 293 pages) comprises the proceedings of a roundtable on held by the OECD's Competition Committee in June 2007. It consists of an executive summary and background paper by the Secretariat, as well as 13 delegation submissions and a summary of the oral discussion. Generally speaking, efficiencies are synergies that enable firms to improve their performance, whether in terms of cost, quality, service, or in the variety of products or services they offer. Some efficiencies are static and some are dynamic, but all of them are good for the welfare of society. Merging companies sometimes argue that even though their proposed union will increase market concentration, any harm stemming from a lessening of competition will be more than offset by the efficiencies that the merger would generate. This roundtable explored some of the thorny issues that competition agencies confront when presented with arguments about dynamic efficiencies. Despite growing interest in efficiencies since the 1970s among competition authorities and courts, there has been a persistent reluctance to incorporate efficiencies in merger analysis. That reluctance is even greater with respect to dynamic efficiencies than it is with respect to static ones. The reason is that even in a static analysis, determining whether a merger is likely to lead to efficiencies and how they will compare with any anti-competitive effects the merger is expected to cause is quite difficult. Making the leap to predicting a merger's dynamic effects is much harder still because those effects will occur - if at all - over several time periods and may be more abstract in nature. Nevertheless, a growing body of commentators is asserting that enforcement agencies should pay more attention to dynamic efficiencies and less attention to short-run price effects, especially in markets where consumers have more to gain through innovation than through lower prices on existing products. Both the desirability and the difficulty of placing more emphasis on dynamic efficiencies in merger reviews are addressed