Recently, federal regulators responsible for enforcing the antitrust laws have shown a renewed interest in the potential anticompetitive effects of vertical mergers--mergers between two independent firms in successive stages of production. This greater activism in vertical merger cases is in...

Recent papers have shown conditions under which vertical, mergers can result in anticompetitive foreclosure of unintegrated rivals. These models imply that a necessary but not sufficient condition for anticompetitive foreclosure is that unintegrated rivals are less profitable after a vertical...