This chapter aims to review data-driven mergers including, but not limited to, major conglomerates involving large scale of individual user data, known as ‘big data', by Facebook (WhatsApp), Microsoft (Yahoo!, Skype and LinkedIn), Google (Double Click), TomTom (Tele Atlas), Publicis/Omnicon,...

Should internet era merger policy differ from industrial era merger policy? Platform ecosystems rely on economies of scale, data-driven economies of scope, high-quality algorithmic systems, and strong network effects that frequently promote winner-take-most markets. Their market dominance has...

Antitrust populists increasingly call on the government to “break up big tech.” But antitrust enforcers would face heavy evidentiary burdens if they sought to break a company up on the premise that a long-consummated merger was unlawful from the outset and should have been blocked years ago....

We analyze horizontal mergers when the acquirer holds a passive partial ownership stake (PPO) in the target firm prior to the merger. We show that a PPO reduces the minimal synergy level necessary to make a merger beneficial for consumers. It follows that an antitrust authority ignoring existing...

There have been a number of studies attempting to quantify the impact of cartels and mergers on prices. The state of the art of empirical analysis related to antitrust is best illustrated by the research of John Connor and John Kwoka. Connor summarizes the existing empirical research that...

We investigate the accuracy of UPP as a tool in antitrust analysis when there are cost efficiencies from a horizontal merger. We include model-based, merger-specific cost efficiencies in a tractable manner and extend the standard UPP formulation to account for these efficiencies. The efficacy of...

The analysis of unilateral effects in horizontal mergers — especially on markets for differentiated goods — can take into consideration the extent to which the merging firms are close competitors. The elimination of a close competitor can result in an upward pricing pressure (UPP) on the...

In this comprehensive review of ex-post merger studies price effects of horizontal transactions are evaluated. By combining and further analyzing the results of 52 retrospective studies on 82 mergers or merger-like transactions it can be shown that the industry alone is no strong indication for...

This paper addresses the potentially negative implications of proposed antitrust legislation on the entrepreneurial ecosystem in general and particularly focuses on the Venture Capitalists (VCs) that fund it. First, it offers a review of how antitrust merger law currently works and how proposed...

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...