Each stage of merger analysis involves predictions about uncertain events. The quality of merger enforcement and its ability to improve consumer welfare depend heavily on how well the federal antitrust agencies cope with such uncertainty. The agencies and the courts have to date adopted an...

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...

Bill Kovacic has written persuasively that the political rhetoric of antitrust has often been at odds with what the antitrust agencies have actually done and with any meaningful assessment of their performance. This article follows Kovacic by analyzing data from the FTC’s and the DOJ’s...

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...

We examine the effects of merger and merger policy on a potential entrant’s pre-merger investment incentives. We establish conditions under which the possibility of merger can induce an entrant to inefficiently imitate an incumbent’s product instead of innovating with a more differentiated...