We analyze evidence production in merger control as a delegation problem in an inquisitorial competition policy system. The antitrust agency's incentives to produce evidence on the efficiency of a merger proposal depend critically on its action set. Allowing for a compromising remedy solution...

The literature identifies a significant drop in merger control enforcement activity on both sides of the Atlantic during the last decade. Furthermore, this drop in enforcement activity is convincingly connected to enforcement problems on the sides of the competition agencies. This paper goes...

Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for...

The relationship between industrial policy and merger control is one of the most controversial topics in European competition law. The debate has become particularly intense in recent years given the perceived failure of free markets and the return of government intervention into the economy. In...

I present the following proposal: information revealed during non-cartel investigations by competition law enforcement authorities, such as evaluation of M&As or investigation of monopolization (dominance) conduct, should be directly used to investigate and prosecute cartels. Currently, in...

The FCC’s analysis of the Comcast-NBCU transaction fills a gap in the contemporary treatment of vertical mergers by providing a roadmap for courts and litigants addressing the possibility of anticompetitive exclusion. The FCC identified the factors any judicial or administrative tribunal would...

Since August 2008, when China’s Anti-Monopoly Law became effective, its Ministry of Commerce has reviewed over 450 notified transactions and issued over a dozen decisions. These decisions, plus the unconditional clearance of several transactions, reveal MOFCOM’s rapidly growing...

Market definition, a concept that has long served to structure competitive analysis, is under assault from theoreticians who object to the inability of the standard analysis to define a market compatible with their models of unilateral effects. Although these unilateral models have not been...

We propose a framework to examine tendencies of convergence in the jurisdictional patterns of the American FTC and the European Commission. Based on a sample of 595 merger cases scrutinized by either of these agencies in the 1995 - 2007 period, we calibrate logit models of the probability of...

We review the Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office Germany) decision on the proposed merger between Springer and ProSiebenSat.1 from an economic point of view. In doing so, it is not our goal to analyse whether the controversial decision by the Bundeskartellamt has been correct or flawed from...