The analysis of horizontal mergers hinges on a tradeoff between unilateral effects and efficiency gains. The article examines the role of uncertainty (on the efficiency gains) in this tradeoff. Common wisdom is that the antitrust authorities should be very cautious about random gains. Our...

Economists have emphasized the role of dissipative advertising and price as signals of quality. Most works, however, limit the number of types to two options: high and low quality. Yet, production costs and quality both result from R&D efforts and therefore are both uncertain. I characterize the...

This paper examines the strategic effects of case preparation in litigation. Specifically, it shows how the pretrial efforts incurred by one party may alter its adversary’s incentives to settle. We build a sequential game with one-sided asymmetric information where the informed party first...

Most retrospective merger studies resort to the treatment effect approach, comparing the price dynamics in a treatment group and in a control group. We propose a systematic method to construct the groups, which applies to any industry with spatial competition. The method is consistent with the...

This paper studies the welfare consequences of a vertical merger that raises rivals' costs when downstream competition is à la Cournot between firms with constant asymmetric marginal costs. The main result is that such a vertical merger can nevertheless improve welfare if it involves a...