The Merger Review Process at the Federal Trade Commission from 1989 to 2016

The modern Merger Guidelines have controlled merger policy for over three decades. Economic theory has evolved (and continues to evolve) and revisions of the Merger Guidelines have integrated some of these considerations into the merger review methodology. This paper tabulates and evaluates information from Federal Trade Commission (FTC) merger reviews using data for 1989 to 2016. The FTC's workload focuses on horizontal mergers, with particular interest in health care, consumer goods, retailing, and a specific group of intermediary product industries. The evidence suggests that a shift away from coordinated interaction (collusion) cases occurred after the release of the 1992 Merger Guidelines, with a further shift focused on differentiated products after the 2010 revision in the Guidelines. Abstracting from mergers to monopoly, the structural characteristics of investigations reviewed with unilateral effects or collusion theories appear similar, but not identical. Most three-to-two and many four-to-three mergers end up as challenged, while other transactions often pass through the review process. Evidence suggests that the probability of ease of entry and cognizable efficiency findings has declined in recent years, as merger analysis seems to have focused on modeling competitive concerns