The institutional design of federal merger review in the United States leads to systematic underenforcement of merger law. This is so even though substantive merger law is relatively well settled, most mergers are not anticompetitive, and the review process properly permits them to proceed...

Algorithms, especially those based on artificial intelligence, play an increasingly important role in our economy. They are used by market participants to make pricing, output, quality, and inventory decisions; to predict market entry, expansion, and exit; and to predict regulatory moves. In a...

This paper applies an intuitive approach based on stock market data to a unique dataset of large concentrations during the period 1990-2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and decision abnormal returns. Under a set of four...

The co-legislators adopted the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in July 2022. The text is landmark legislation that imposes a list of ex-ante obligations and interdictions on large online platforms acting as “gatekeepers” in some core platform services (CPS). Yet, the DMA also imposes an obligation...

The complexity of co-operation in cross-border competition law enforcement increased significantly between 1990 and 2011, underlining the urgency to improve techniques and tools of competition authority co-operation. As international trade has increased, the number of competition law enforcement...

Physicians' practices vary widely, as do their effectiveness and reimbursement. Using a merger of six orthopaedic groups in southeastern Pennsylvania, we find that such groups can generate large, anti-competitive price increases without any demonstrated increases in quality (indirectly measured...

This comment is submitted by the Global Antitrust Institute (GAI) at Scalia Law School at George Mason University to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission regarding its Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century. The GAI Competition Advocacy Program discusses vertical...

This paper conducts a retrospective analysis of a unique merger between two low cost carriers: Southwest Airlines and AirTran Airways. The paper begins with a detailed study of price effects for a variety of routes affected by the merger such as overlapping markets, markets where either carrier...

There are legal grounds to hear competitors in merger control proceedings, and competitor involvement has gained significance. To what extent this is economically sensible is the focus of our game-theoretic analysis. The competition authority applies some welfare standard while the competitor...