Thinking About Coordinated Effects

The 2010 US Horizontal Merger Guidelines offer a substantially modified framework for evaluating coordinated effects. Can we rationally anticipate that this will stimulate the same boom in the antitrust economics of coordinated merger effects as that spurred by the unilateral effects section in the 1992 Guidelines? The answer is likely “no” partly because there is no consensus among economists and practitioners regarding the market factors that predict collusive behavior. Nonetheless, the approach in the 2010 Guidelines provides a useful framework for injecting some rigor into the analysis of tacit coordination