actually reduce consumer surplus which opposes the use of an efficiency defense in merger control. …

that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for 1,014 mergers affecting 12,325 antitrust markets scrutinized by the … concerns about the Commission’s merger enforcement being too lax. …

In current horizontal merger policy in the US and the EU an explicit efficiency defense is allowed. On both sides of …’ potential to harm consumers in the relevant market. Current merger policy is implicitly based on the assumption that rational … managers will only propose privately profitable mergers. In this thesis I will show that the empirical evidence on merger …