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...

From Facebook acquiring WhatsAPP and Instagram to Microsoft buying out Linkedin, Skype and Github or Google swallowing Motorola Mobility, DoubleClick or Nest Labs, mergers and acquisitions in the digital economy have been controversial. Some of the concerns have been fairly traditional. While...

Large digital platforms acquired 1149 firms in various economic sectors between 1987 and July 2022. The European Commission reviewed only 21 of these mergers as most did not meet the European Union merger control turnover threshold. This suggests under-enforcement, with some problematic mergers...

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,...

Using data on the prices paid by multichannel video programing distributors (“MVPDs”) for basic cable networks, I conduct a retrospective analysis of the price effects of the Comcast-NBCU merger. Estimates from both the difference-in-differences and lagged-dependent variable models indicate...

While in the developed world there has been a growing interest in studying, opining, critiquing, and publicly acknowledging their mea culpa in a very lax application of agencies’ competition enforcement in digital markets, agencies in developing countries have been trying to play catch up. We...

Empirical evidence suggests that many mergers do not increase profits of the participating firms and decrease welfare. Due to the globalization of markets we should take an international view on mergers and their welfare effects. This paper develops a Bertrand-model of an international...

On March 20, 2011, wireless provider AT&T announced its intention to merge with T-Mobile USA, a competing wireless provider. This article reviews the economic analysis of this proposed acquisition that we carried out for Sprint and explains why the merger would have been anticompetitive. We...

An extensive literature has investigated the effect of market structure on innovation. A persistent concern is that market structure may be endogenous to innovation. Firms may choose to merge so as to capture information spillovers or they may choose to merge so as to dampen competition in...

The Merger Guidelines released in March 2008 by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) provide a guide to the analytical approach the ACCC intends to adopt to assessing mergers for the purposes of s.50 of the Trade Practices Act. The new Guidelines do a relatively good job in...