On November 14, 2018, Sabre Corporation announced an agreement to acquire Farelogix, Inc. for $360 million. Sabre is a global distribution system, a company that compiles information from airlines, supplies this information to travel agents who book flights and complete other transactions...

The Sabre decision suggests that US courts might require a particularly high standard of proof in mergers involving claims of potential competition challenged under Section 7 of the Clayton Act. The UK enforcement system seems to have greater flexibility, which at least in part allowed the CMA...

Economists widely agree that, absent sufficient efficiencies or other offsetting factors, mergers that increase concentration substantially are likely to be anticompetitive. Further, holding everything else equal, the magnitude of anticompetitive effects tends to be larger, the larger is the...

This paper examines the construction of a price index based on an estimated demand system. In principle the method examined can produce a price index that accounts for introduction of new products and quality changes in existing products. However, I isolate two key assumptions that have to be...

We compare outcomes obtained by sellers who listed their home on a newly developed For-Sale-By-Owner (FSBO) web site versus those who used an agent and the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). We do not find support for the hypothesis that listing on the MLS helps sellers obtain a significantly...

We study the trade-offs faced by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that serve as platforms through which consumers access both television and internet services. As online streaming video improves, these providers may respond by attempting to steer consumers away from streaming video toward their...

In 2015, numerous companies offered health insurance in the United States, but there were five clear leaders in terms of revenue: UnitedHealth Group, Anthem, Aetna, Cigna, and Humana. On July 3 of that year, Aetna announced an agreement to purchase Humana for $37 billion in a combination of cash...

From 2018 to 2020, the government suffered a string of defeats in antitrust merger trials. In each of those cases, a federal district court judge rejected the government plaintiffs’ claim that the transaction would harm competition in violation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act and thus declined...

This is an invited chapter for the forthcoming Volume 4 of the Handbook of Industrial Organization. We present empirical models of demand and supply in differentiated products industries with an emphasis on the key ideas arising from the recent applied literature. We start with a discussion of...