Until theory can be used to determine how likely it is that a restraint will lead to an anticompetitive outcome, decision makers will be left with a considerable amount of uncertainty.

Economics at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) covers both the antitrust and consumer protection missions. In this year’s essay, we focus mainly on the competition-side of the agency. Drawing on a wealth of recent research, we provide descriptive and analytical information about the petroleum...

In April 2002, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the Hospital Merger Retrospective Project to study consummated hospital mergers. This project was precipitated by a long string of unsuccessful hospital merger challenges by the FTC, the US Department of Justice, and the state of...

Retrospective analyses of hospital mergers may be uniquely valuable because they speak directly to two important issues - the methods used for delineating relevant geographic markets in hospital merger analysis, and the implications of not-for-profit status on post-merger hospital pricing - that...

The manufacture and distribution of phosphate rock and its associated products are large consumers of energy. As a consequence, a change in the price of energy can have a quite substantial effect on the cost of production. This will affect the price that the product can be sold for. Whether this...

We highlight the specific problem of lack of transport as a significant barrier to local job seekers finding work in rural areas with a focus on the Sutherland and Easter Ross area of Highland Scotland. The paper describes the Transport to Employment (T2E) scheme: a novel solution to overcoming...