Using a sample of 96 mergers notified to the EU Commission and logit regression techniques, we analyse the Commission's decision process. We find that the probability of a phase 2 investigation and of a prohibition of the merger increases with the parties' market shares. The probability...

As of 7 March 2024, the EU Commission began to enforce its controversial Digital Markets Act (DMA). This article sheds light on the recent debate. It lists the dos and don'ts of the DMA as well as stakeholder reactions to them before tracing some of the underlying motivations and reasoning that...

An increasingly important part of contemporary merger control both in the US and the EU is unilateral effects analysis, particularly with regard to oligopolistic mergers. In practice, this requires econometric analyses of past market data and, above all, the construction of simulation models in...

The recent Impala Judgment by the CFI on the Sony/BMG Decision by the Commission represents the most important ruling on collective dominance since Airtours. We review both the Decision and the Judgment and derive implications for the institutional and substantive development of EU Merger...

The purpose of this paper is to represent in which way a stable and no negligible growth in demand can affect the level of sustainability of collusion. For the European Commission this assumption is seen as a factor that disincentives collusion and pushes to a competitive behavior. This fact...

The literature identifies a significant drop in merger control enforcement activity on both sides of the Atlantic during the last decade. Furthermore, this drop in enforcement activity is convincingly connected to enforcement problems on the sides of the competition agencies. This paper goes...

The main goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of key regulatory changes in the European merger control and to evaluate their real impact on the efficiency of merger regulation. Our main contribution is an empirical analysis of a unique representative sample of 161 horizontal mergers...