Marathon-Ashland Petroleum's (MAP) 1999 acquisition of the Michigan assets of Ultramar Diamond Shamrock (UDS) increased MAP's share of terminal storage in Michigan from about 16 percent to about 25 percent and increased the share of gasoline stations bearing a MAP brand from about 16 percent to...

On January 1, 1998 Marathon and Ashland combined their refining and marketing assets in a joint venture which was unchallenged by U.S. antitrust authorities. Because there were no divestitures, the transaction led to a significant increase in concentration in the wholesale and retail sale of...

In this paper we propose a method to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. horizontal merger policy and apply it to the study of five recent consumer product mergers. We selected the mergers from those that, from the public record, seemed to be most problematic for the antitrust agencies. Thus we...

Merger-specific efficiencies continue to play a relatively small role in merger enforcement and merger retrospectives. Motivated by the paucity of empirical analyses of merger-specific efficiencies, we examine a merger's market share effects. Standard merger theory predicts that if...

In this paper we propose a method to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. horizontal merger policy and apply it to the study of five recent consumer product mergers. We selected the mergers from those that, from the public record, seemed to be most problematic for the antitrust agencies. Thus we...

Tacit collusion reduces welfare comparably to explicit collusion but remains mostly unaddressed by antitrust enforcement which greatly depends on evidence of explicit communication. We propose to target specific elements of firms’ behavior that facilitate tacit collusion by providing...

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of cartelisation and managerial incentives on the productive efficiency of German coal mining corporations. We focus on coal mining in the Ruhr district, Germany’s main mining area. We use stochastic frontier analysis and an unbalanced dynamic panel data...

Sind die steigenden Benzinpreise ein Zeichen mangelnden Wettbewerbs auf den Öl- und Kraftstoffmärkten? Was kann die Einrichtung einer »Markttransparenzstelle« beim Bundeskartellamt bewirken? Für Justus Haucap, Universität Düsseldorf und Vorsitzender der Monopolkommission, sollten...

This article studies dynamic pricing strategies in the Italian gasoline market before and after the market leader unilaterally announced its commitment to adopt a sticky-pricing policy. Using daily Italian firm level prices and weekly average EU prices, we show that the effect of the new policy...

Sind die steigenden Benzinpreise ein Zeichen mangelnden Wettbewerbs auf den Öl- und Kraftstoffmärkten? Zur Ergänzung der Beiträge im ifo Schnelldienst 11/2012 erläutert Andreas Mundt, Präsident des Bundeskartellamts, die Gründe für den Gesetzentwurf zur Einrichtung einer...