The U.S. Horizontal Merger Guidelines and guidelines issued by enforcement agencies around the world employ the hypothetical monopolist paradigm to delineate relevant markets, but they provide only an imprecise and incomplete algorithm for implementing that paradigm. This paper fills the gap by...

"Critical elasticity of demand" and "critical loss" analysis are now standard analytical tools for implementing the hypothetical monopolist paradigm for market delineation. Although these tools are highly useful, this paper presents three scenarios in which their standard application can be...

The legality of a horizontal merger under section 7 of the Clayton Act turns on a reckoning of its social costs and benefits. This paper reviews what economics has to say about that reckoning and explores the relationship between economic learning and merger law and policy

Licensing technology essential to a standard can present a hold-up problem. After designing new products incorporating a standard, a manufacturer could be confronted by an innovator asserting patent rights to essential technology. A damages remedy provided by antitrust or some other body of law...

Scholarship on competition policy has begun to explore the implications of learning from behavioral research and to challenge the assumption of profit maximization at the heart of neoclassical economic theory of the firm. This scholarship is briefly reviewed, focusing on merger control....

Robert Crandall and Clifford Winston set out to review and enlarge the body of scholarly evidence on the effect of antitrust policy on consumer prices. They ignore, however, the great weight of evidence supporting the two core elements of antitrust policy - criminal prosecution of cartel...

The Department of Justice alleged American Airlines violated section 2 of the Sherman Act when it added substantial capacity to four routes after smaller rivals had entered. The case raised interesting issues relating to mechanism through which the capacity additions could have excluded...

We investigate the relationship between the price effects of mergers in Bertrand oligopoly and the rates at which merger synergies are passed through to consumers in the form of lower prices. Our main conclusion is that pass-through rates and price effects are closely related. In particular,...

The Weyerhaeuser case presents the scenario of a firm that successfully engages in exclusionary conduct, obtains a monopsony, and yet does not have any potential to injure the end users of its products. Rather, the conduct has the immediate effect of injuring competitors, and the longer-term...

We study mergers among firms that compete by simultaneously choosing price and location. The merged firm moves its two products away from each other to reduce cannibalization, and the non-merging firms move their products in between the merging firm's products. Post-merger repositioning...