The 1997 Merger Guidelines appeared to significantly expand the role of efficiency considerations in merger analysis. However, it is possible that the revision simply memorialized existing policy and thus served more to improve transparency than reform policy. By combining an existing review of...

The 2010 Merger Guidelines define an improved road-map for merger analysis. Evidence is elevated to a position of prominence in Section II of the revised draft, although we note that the presentation lacks the necessary context. Economic theory now plays a larger role in the analysis, a change...

The Hart Scott Rodino program, coupled with the modern Merger Guidelines, has controlled merger enforcement for the last twenty years. Economists have offered numerous commentaries, some supportive of the status quo, others suggestive of change. This paper tabulates and evaluates information...

The 2010 Merger Guidelines appear to elevate game theoretic models of competitive concerns to the primary concern of merger policy, while reducing the importance of market definition. Although situations in which this change makes some sense exist, we observe that, as a practical matter, market...

Natural experiments may serve as a test of an economic theory that purports to evaluate the competitive effects of a proposed transaction and therefore play an important role in merger analysis. Using aggregate reviews of Federal Trade Commission merger studies, it is possible to identify a...

At first glance, lawyers remain in control of price fixing analysis. Agreements to raise price are per-se illegal, and economists only seem needed to estimate damages. However, economic insights remain relevant; not all price-related agreements are driven by pricing issues and some price...

The European Union (EU) and the United States (US) enforce the world's two best known merger policies. The EU addresses transactions that are likely to impede effective competition, historically, with some type of dominance analysis, while the US focuses on mergers that are likely to...

In 1989, Barry Harris & Joseph Simons developed a quantitative method to implement the Horizontal Merger Guidelines' hypothetical monopolist test with a market-level “critical loss” analysis. The appeal of Harris & Simons' framework is that it created a simple, intuitive approach to...

The hypothetical monopolist test has been used to define antitrust markets for over 20 years. However, many of these applications occur within the enforcement agencies and thus the implementation process is not fully transparent to antitrust practitioners. This paper provides a study of 116...

This paper presents an analysis of merger enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission under the 1992 Merger Guidelines. Econometric analysis suggests that enforcement decisions are best predicted with the Herfindahl when the relevant theory is collusion and the number of significant rivals when...