Modern antitrust law has come under intense criticism in recent years, with a bipartisan chorus of complaints about the power of technology and internet platforms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. A fundamental issue in these debates is how to define the “market” for the purposes...

Antitrust practitioners are mis-applying simple vertical merger screening techniques (e.g., vertical foreclosure arithmetic, price pressure analysis) to reach flawed and internally inconsistent conclusions about vertical mergers. Specifically, practitioners have struck on a formula for claiming...

The 2010 revision of the Merger Guidelines highlighted the importance of both economic modeling of the post-merger competitive process and effects evidence, defined as information able to predict the transaction’s likely competitive effect. With sufficient data, it is possible to see how...

AI technologies can improve upon the current system of merger notification and review. Predictive technologies—such as supervised machine learning—combined with unprecedented growth in data will provide antitrust agencies with the opportunity to better refine the law and the review process....

The welfare implications of vertical mergers have been a subject of disagreement for decades. Similar to horizontal mergers, economists need to weigh the efficiency gains relative to the market power concerns when considering the competitive effects of vertical mergers. However, in vertical...

This paper analyses all final merger decisions by the European Commission from the beginning of 1990 up to the end of 2019. We use a novel dataset, containing information about 6245 merger cases from all economic sectors and combining all sorts of decisions, inclusive of withdrawn and prohibited...

Mergers involving nascent competition are a hot topic in antitrust circles, especially in light of the pending FTC case against Facebook; but the thinking about the topic is nascent, too. This paper is intended to contribute to that thinking and to discuss a variety of questions that have not...

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...

While the possibility of algorithmic price discrimination and algorithmic collusion has been extensively discussed in the global antitrust community in recent years, there has been much more limited discussion in the context of mergers. In this article, we aim to fill this gap by discussing some...

Only large mergers must be reported to the US government, so many anticompetitive deals may effectively avoid antitrust scrutiny. This paper uses data from the dialysis industry to show that premerger notifications are essential to antitrust enforcement and that ensuing enforcement actions...