We consider mergers between multi-product firms in a market with monopolistically competitive fringe of single-product firms. Aggregate product variety is determined by product variety choices of multi-product firms and entry/exit decisions of single-product firms. Mergers can generate marginal...

Merger policy 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 static efficiency to account for innovation and address dynamic efficiency. Innovation can fundamentally affect merger analysis in two ways....

Australia’s merger control regime recently returned to spotlight following recent statements by Chair of Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Rod Sims, that Australia’s current merger laws are ‘failing to adequately protect competition’. This note provides an...

The Internet and digitization at the turn of the XXI century have changed the old offline business paradigm, resulting in an explosion of online platform enterprises. Furthermore, the worldwide coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has shown how society and the economy are becoming increasingly...

In January 2022, the Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission issued a Request for Information on Merger Enforcement, seeking comment on how the agencies can modernize enforcement of antitrust laws regarding mergers. A theme in the RFI is whether current guidance underemphasizes or...

The Global Antitrust Institute (“GAI”) respectfully submits this Comment to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) in connection with their Request for Information on Merger Enforcement (“Merger RFI”). This comment addresses the questions...

The Global Antitrust Institute (“GAI”) respectfully submits this Comment to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) in connection with their Request for Information on Merger Enforcement (“Merger RFI”). The GAI welcomes the opportunity to...

The Global Antitrust Institute (“GAI”) respectfully submits this Comment to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) in response to their Request for Information on Merger Enforcement. This Comment addresses the questions related to Purpose,...

The Global Antitrust Institute (“GAI”) respectfully submits this Comment to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) in connection with their Request for Information on Merger Enforcement (“Merger RFI”) This comment addresses the questions...

This Comment focuses on Section 7: Potential and Nascent Competition of the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission's January 18, 2022, Request for Information on Merger Enforcement. Despite information and uncertainty problems with assessing potential and nascent competition, the...

On January 18, 2022 the FTC and the Antitrust Division requested suggestions for improving the federal Horizontal Merger Guidelines. We filed this comment, urging the enforcers to strengthen the articulations of the incipiency doctrine and the Philadelphia National Bank presumption that are...

The Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (“the agencies”) have recently published a Request for Information (“RFI”) on Merger Enforcement in which they “seek public comment on how the agencies can modernize enforcement of the antitrust laws...

The paper provides new evidence on proxy indicators of market power for major European countries. The data shows moderately increasing average industry concentration over the last two decades, a considerably increasing proportion of high concentration industries, and an overall tendency towards...

Modern antitrust law has come under intense criticism in recent years, with a bipartisan chorus of complaints about the power of technology and internet platforms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. A fundamental issue in these debates is how to define the “market” for the purposes...

Antitrust practitioners are mis-applying simple vertical merger screening techniques (e.g., vertical foreclosure arithmetic, price pressure analysis) to reach flawed and internally inconsistent conclusions about vertical mergers. Specifically, practitioners have struck on a formula for claiming...

The 2010 revision of the Merger Guidelines highlighted the importance of both economic modeling of the post-merger competitive process and effects evidence, defined as information able to predict the transaction’s likely competitive effect. With sufficient data, it is possible to see how...

As healthcare markets continue to consolidate and prices continue to rise, economists, legal scholars, antitrust enforcers, and policymakers have the opportunity and obligation to examine how the dynamics of our healthcare markets have changed over time and how those changes affect consumers and...

AI technologies can improve upon the current system of merger notification and review. Predictive technologies—such as supervised machine learning—combined with unprecedented growth in data will provide antitrust agencies with the opportunity to better refine the law and the review process....

Decision making process of regulators concerning mergers of competitors is the main ex ante tool to regulate competition (in other words – to ensure the optimal structure on the market) in order to protect the market, as both abuse of dominant position and cartel law mainly deal with the harm...

Mergers involving nascent competition are a hot topic in antitrust circles, especially in light of the pending FTC case against Facebook; but the thinking about the topic is nascent, too. This paper is intended to contribute to that thinking and to discuss a variety of questions that have not...

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...

While the possibility of algorithmic price discrimination and algorithmic collusion has been extensively discussed in the global antitrust community in recent years, there has been much more limited discussion in the context of mergers. In this article, we aim to fill this gap by discussing some...

The paper presents the theoretical framework explaining the primary cause of mergers of the service-oriented firms. Using the example of equity analyst firms, I analyze the motivation behind these mergers. The analysis is not limited to the aforementioned type of firms and could be extended to...

I appreciate the opportunity to submit a comment in response to the FTC’s Request for Information on Merger Enforcement. This comment focuses on responding to Question 12.h of the Request, which asks whether changes should be made to the guidelines’ approach to common ownership and...

The rise of unilateral effects analysis has significantly increased the importance of presenting a comprehensive review of the efficiencies relevant to a potentially problematic merger. Although numerous articles address efficiencies from a theoretical point of view, few practical commentaries...

As an element of competition and antitrust law frameworks, merger policy plays an important role in preventing acquisitions that would otherwise allow incumbent firms to extinguish competitive threats and entrench their dominance. But evidence suggests that current approaches to merger law in...

This paper analyses all final merger decisions by the European Commission from the beginning of 1990 up to the end of 2019. We use a novel dataset, containing information about 6245 merger cases from all economic sectors and combining all sorts of decisions, inclusive of withdrawn and prohibited...

Large digital platforms acquired 1149 firms in various economic sectors between 1987 and July 2022. The European Commission reviewed only 21 of these mergers as most did not meet the European Union merger control turnover threshold. This suggests under-enforcement, with some problematic mergers...

Die Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit der wissenschaftlichen Analyse der deutschen und europäischen Wettbewerbspolitik, wobei eine Evaluation vergangener wettbewerbspolitischer Entscheidungen in ausgewählten Bereichen der Wettbewerbspolitik vorgenommen wird und relevante Implikationen für...

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...

An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level...

An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level...

This paper focuses on industries that require intensive investment to compete and innovate well before demand materialises (or fails to do so). In these industries, the existence of exit barriers may cause firms to become “zombies” ex post and result in significant underinvestment ex ante....

U.S. antitrust law empowers enforcers to review pending mergers that might undermine competition. But there is growing evidence that the merger-review regime is failing to perform its core procompetitive function. Industry concentration and the power of dominant firms are increasing across key...

This paper considers the interpretation of the substantive test laid down in Article 2 of Regulation 139/2004. It focuses on horizontal mergers in the so-called ‘gap’ cases, which would not result in the creation or the strengthening of a (single or collective) dominant position. In its...

We provide evidence that market concentration (HHI) based bank antitrust review can be improved by incorporating a determinant of substitutability between merging banks—the proximity of their branch networks. Using difference-in-differences to estimate the effects of bank mergers, we find that...

In this comprehensive review of ex-post merger studies price effects of horizontal transactions are evaluated. By combining and further analyzing the results of 52 retrospective studies on 82 mergers or merger-like transactions it can be shown that the industry alone is no strong indication for...

This paper provides a theory of strategic innovation project choice by incumbents and start-ups which serves as a foundation for the analysis of acquisition policy. We show that prohibiting acquisitions has a weakly negative innovation effect. We provide conditions determining the size of the...