The paper develops a four-step framework to detect anticompetitive horizontal mergers. In the first step, an estimate of the impact of the merger on the market price needs to be derived. Subsequent, the second step of the framework has to assess whether such a predicted price increase would be...

In the past 20 years, large digital platforms have made many acquisitions, mainly young and innovative startups. Few of them have been reviewed by competition authorities and little is known on their evolution after acquisition. This paper intends to fill in this gap by looking at the...

We analyze evidence production in merger control as a delegation problem under an inquisitorial and an adversarial competition policy system. Agents' incentives to produce evidence depend critically on the action set of the decision maker. In an inquisitorial system, allowing ex ante for a...

This paper presents a broad retrospective evaluation of mergers and merger decisions in the digital sector. We first discuss the most crucial features of digital markets such as network effects, multi-sidedness, big data, and rapid innovation that create important challenges for competition...

Over the period 2015-2017, the five giant technologically leading firms, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) acquired 175 companies, from small start-ups to billion dollar deals. By investigating this intense M&A, this paper ambitions a better understanding of the Big Five's...

In this paper, we analyse the final decisions for merger cases prepared by the European Commission (EC) since 1990 and build a unique subsample for all non-cleared cases. These incorporate all merger notifications which were either withdrawn by the notifying parties or have been prohibited by...

The overall objective of this paper is to contribute conceptually to the questions why and how regions transform and it joins the debate on economic evolution and institutional change. The paper addresses the challenge of how to conceptualise the interdependencies of institutions of different...

We propose a theory of free movement of goods and labor between two economies in the presence of moral hazard. Each country produces two final goods where the productive efforts of workers cannot be perfectly observed, or verified only in the complex industry. We show that national institutional...

So-called open source software (OSS) is marked by free access to the software and its source code. Copyright-based OSS licenses permit users to use, change, improve and redistribute the software, which is designed and developed in a public, collaborative manner. High quality OSS products like...

The paper analyzes the impact of institutional and cultural factors on a remarkable economic activity: the production of so-called open source software (OSS). OSS is marked by free access to the software and its source code. Copyright-based OSS licenses permit users to use, change, improve and...