This book chapter (forthcoming in Antitrust Stories) tells the story of the FTC's successful 1997 effort to block the proposed Staples/Office Depot merger. It describes the competing presentations of the FTC and the merging firms during the preliminary injunction hearing and places that trial in...

In 2016 the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) lost motions for preliminary injunction in two separate hospital mergers. In both cases the district courts rejected the FTC's geographic market definition based on flawed interpretations of the “hypothetical monopolist” test. Fortunately, the...

We describe a simple initial indicator of whether a proposed merger between rivals in a differentiated product industry is likely to raise prices through unilateral effects. Our diagnostic calibrates upward pricing pressure (UPP) resulting from the merger, based on the price/cost margins of the...

Even a cursory review of the Antitrust Division's new Merger Guidelines reveals that they revolve around the concept of “concentration” and advance a particular method of measuring it – the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. While concentration is scarcely a new idea in the antitrust treatment of...

On September 4, 1996, the two largest office superstore chains in the United States, Office Depot and Staples, announced their agreement to merge. Seven months later, the Federal Trade Commission voted 4 to 1 to oppose the merger on the grounds that it was likely to harm competition and lead to...

We examine antitrust rules in a two county general equilibrium trade model, contrasting national and multilateral (cooperative) determination of competition policy, exploring the properties of the policy equilibrium. It is not imperfect competition, but variation in competitive stance between...

Miller (2014, 2017) proposes an approach to the analysis of merger effects in markets involving procurement where one of the two product lines is discontinued. This note proves that, as presented in Miller (2014, 2017) and applied to a number of actual merger cases, eliminating one of the two...