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...

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...

In current horizontal merger policy in the US and the EU an explicit efficiency defense is allowed. On both sides of the Atlantic mergers are unconditionally approved if internal efficiencies are sufficient to reverse the mergers’ potential to harm consumers in the relevant market. Current...

This paper presents a broad retrospective evaluation of mergers and merger decisions in the digital sector. We first discuss the most crucial features of digital markets such as network effects, multi-sidedness, big data, and rapid innovation that create important challenges for competition...

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 our question. The competition authority applies some welfare standard while the competitor cares about its own profit. In...

The importance of economics to the analysis and enforcement of competition policy and law has increased tremendously in the developed market economies in the past forty years. In younger and developing market economies, competition law itself has a history of twenty to twenty-five years at most...

This paper applies a novel methodology to a unique dataset of large concentrations during the period 1990-2002 to assess merger control's effectiveness. By using data gathered from several sources and employing different evaluation techniques, we analyze the economic effects of the European...

Using a sample of 167 mergers during the period 1990-2002 involving 544 firms either as merging firms or competitors, we contrast a measure of the merger's profitability based on event studies with one based on accounting data. We find positive and significant correlations between them when...

A merger between two innovation competitors is often suspected to reduce the variety of heterogeneous entities which are currently undertaking R&D or which are well situated to undertake R&D in a certain field. The consequential reduction of "diversity" can be detrimental to innovation because...