A raft of articles offered contrasting views on analytic tools for assessing unilateral effects from differentiated products mergers. We revisit this debate to clarify the issues and place them in context. We consider the choice among analytic tools at three stages of a merger assessment -...

Scholarship on competition policy has begun to explore the implications of learning from behavioral research and to challenge the assumption of profit maximization at the heart of neoclassical economic theory of the firm. This scholarship is briefly reviewed, focusing on merger control....

We propose a simple method for predicting price effects from mergers between branded retail chains competing in many local markets. When past mergers created markets with the same number of brands but different numbers of brand owners, price data at a single point in time exhibit between-market...

Licensing technology essential to a standard can present a hold-up problem. After designing new products incorporating a standard, a manufacturer could be confronted by an innovator asserting patent rights to essential technology. A damages remedy provided by antitrust or some other body of law...

The Obama Administration's Council of Economic Advisers expressed concern that competition was threatened by increasing industry concentration. Academics, commentators, and journalists have joined the chorus. But none demonstrated increasing concentration of meaningful markets, as are used in...

Eager to shed constraints imposed by Sherman Act precedent, New FTC Chair Lina M. Khan issued a statement declaring her intention to attack “unfair methods of competition even if they do not violate a separate antitrust statute.” She has sought to distance herself from the Sherman Act’s...

Horizontal mergers give rise to unilateral anticompetitive effects if they cause the merged firm to act less intensely competitive than the merging firms, while non-merging rivals do not alter their competitive strategies. This chapter describes the economic theory underlying unilateral...

European enforcers have brought high-profile antitrust cases against the tech giants, and both activists and members of Congress are calling for action in the United States. This short note identifies ten hard-wired differences between the European and American enforcement regimes that make very...

Defending a challenged merger on the basis of synergies requires an analysis of the likely pass through to consumers of associated marginal cost reductions. This paper explores the nature and extent of that pass though with differentiated consumer products. Pass-through rates are shown to depend...