Although large buyers like Walmart and Tyson Foods occupy important positions in the American economy, antitrust law remains focused on the conduct of sellers. Moreover, when mergers of buyers have been challenged, the cases have been based on a single theory – that the merger would create a...

This article addresses the application of the economic literature on merger simulation to the practical context of antitrust enforcement. It highlights the value of simple simulations as a basis for creating screens and presumptions – particularly the gross upward pricing pressure index for...

This brief comment responds to the analysis of Obama administration merger policy in Daniel A. Crane, Has the Obama Justice Department Reinvigorated Antitrust Enforcement? 65 STAN. L. REV. ONLINE 13 (2012)

Law enforcement by regulatory authorities on complaints may replicate not only advantages but also disadvantages of both public and private enforcement. In Russian antitrust enforcement there are strong incentives to open investigations on almost every complaint. The increasing number of...

Sometimes what appears to be a little, almost imperceptible change can have a huge impact on a policy regime. The recently revised DOJ/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines contain such a change, as the document recognizes the importance of Critical Loss Analysis in defining a market, but introduces...

Since initially presented in the 1982 Department of Justice Horizontal Merger Guidelines, market definition has been adopted nearly worldwide to see if a merger would substantially lessen competition. This framework is also useful for addressing the similarly counterfactual question of whether...

We evaluate the economic impact of the change in European merger legislation in 2004 and propose a general framework focusing on four different policy dimensions: 1) predictability, 2) decision errors, 3) reversion of anti-competitive rents, and 4) deterrence. We find that after the reform the...

In this article, we examine the open access debate in the context of cable services and broadband Internet services from an antitrust framework. Our analysis is prompted by the recent AT&T-MediaOne and AOL-Time Warner mergers, which raise issues concerning the impact of integrated cable content...

Merger review is the most active area of U.S. antitrust policy. It is now widely believed that merger policy must move beyond its traditional focus on short-run, price and output effects to account for longer-run effects on technological innovation. The question is, how should merger policy...

On March 20, 2011, wireless provider AT&T announced its intention to merge with T-Mobile USA, a competing wireless provider. This article reviews the economic analysis of this proposed acquisition that we carried out for Sprint and explains why the merger would have been anticompetitive. We...