The purpose of this short article is to aid practitioners in analyzing the competitive effects of vertical and complementary product mergers. It is also intended to assist the agencies if and when they undertake revision of the 1984 U.S. Vertical Merger Guidelines. Those Guidelines are out of...

We have revised our earlier listing of vertical merger enforcement actions by the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission since 1994. This revised listing includes 66 vertical matters beginning in 1994 through April 2020. It includes challenges and certain proposed transactions that...

This paper looks at whether the standard unilateral effects model can be applied to non-price competition parameters such as innovation. This question arises because competition authorities are intervening in horizontal mergers that are found to give rise to a “significant impediment to...

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....

Increasingly, cable and satellite TV services (known as “MVPDs”) seek to acquire upstream programming creators, as illustrated by AT&T's recent merger with Time-Warner. At the same time, the pay-TV industry is rife with “most-favored nation” (MFN) agreements, which can sharply constrict...

Mergers in the pharmaceutical sector warrant special scrutiny not only because of concerns over affordability of medicines, but also because the institutional details of pharmaceutical markets complicate the economic analysis of merger effects. Standard anti-trust analysis of mergers, in...

Pharmaceutical markets are complex. Multiple agents, including doctors, insurers, and pharmacies, play critical roles that affect competition between manufacturers and patient choice between drugs. This complexity, however, is neglected in standard antitrust analysis. In evaluating proposed...

One of the most striking and undertheorized aspects of fields that commercialize patented technologies is the dynamic interplay of structural forces pushing toward consolidation. Of course, technological industries are complex ecosystems featuring numerous players of different sizes along the...

Tax laws applicable to triangular mergers lack neutrality, are complex, and overlap substantially with other tax-preferred forms of corporate acquisition. Their current status is a result of both path dependency and Congress's attempt to create consistency within a framework founded upon...

This is one of the first articles to demonstrate that the primary goal of antitrust is neither exclusively to enhance economic efficiency, nor to address any social or political factor. Rather, the overriding intent behind the merger laws was to prevent prices to purchasers from rising due to...