Horizontal mergers are usually under the scrutiny of antitrust authorities due to their potential undesirable effects on prices and consumer surplus. Ex-post evidence, however, suggests that not always these effects take place and even relevant mergers may end up having negligible price effects....

When it examines the risk of coordinated effects, an antitrust authority will usually compare the situation where the merger is accepted with an attendant risk of collusion with the benchmark case in which competition is present ex-post. The main objective of this paper is to show that the...

This article examines the incentive to merge in a Bertrand competition model with generalized substitutability and price competition. The model suggests that acquisition of firms by their rivals can result in maximal concentration of the industry.

Horizontal mergers are usually under the scrutiny of antitrust authorities due to their potential undesirable effects on prices and consumer surplus. Ex-post evidence, however, suggests that not always these effects take place and even relevant mergers may end up having negligible price effects....

The combination of structural remedies and efficiency gains in a merger may lead to pro-competitive outcomes, thus maintaining pre-merger prices. Two types of efficiencies are necessary. The first corresponds to a flatter marginal cost function, the second to a decrease in the intercept of the...

The fight against cartels is a priority for antitrust authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. What differs between the EU and the US is not the basic toolkit for achieving deterrence, but to whom it is targeted. In the EU, pecuniary sanctions against the firm are the only instruments...

This article analyzes the incentive to merge in a context of price competition with horizontal product differentiation. In contrast to the results obtained by Kamien and Zang (1990), we show that merged equilibria can appear in this game. Moreover monopolization of the industry occurs with a...

The theoretical analysis of merger poses a number of paradoxes. If firms compete in prices, a merger is profitable for all parties involved. Outsiders, however, free-ride and earn higher profits than insiders. The "spokes model" is a recently introduced framework to study n-firms spatial...

In this paper, we study the impact of a merger on collusion depending on the endowment of capital asset among firms. We show that the merger makes the collusion easier to sustain when asymmetric capital stock combines with less efficient insiders because of more symmetric conditions and closer...