Mergers and acquisitions are a major component of antitrust law and practice. The U.S. antitrust agencies spend a majority of their time on merger enforcement. The focus of most merger review at the agencies involves horizontal mergers, that is, mergers among firms that compete at the same level...

There seems to be consensus that the Department of Justice's 1984 Vertical Merger Guidelines do not reflect either modern theoretical and empirical economic analysis or current agency enforcement policy. Yet widely divergent views of preferred enforcement policies have been expressed among...

In reliance on Qualcomm's FRAND promises, key SSOs incorporated its technologies into wireless standards. Qualcomm takes the position that its patented technologies are essential to those standards and, therefore, that any firm making or selling a standard-compliant product infringes its...

The FTC recently found McWane, Inc. liable for unlawful monopoly maintenance by a 3-1 majority. The dispute among the FTC Commissioners raises important and interesting issues regarding the law and economics of exclusive dealing and the proper evaluation of the competitive effects of...

This Feature summarizes why and how vertical merger enforcement should be invigorated. In our modern market system, vigorous vertical merger enforcement is a necessity. Strong enforcement is particularly important in markets where economies of scale and network effects lead to barriers to entry...

This note describes the implementation of the hypothetical monopolist ssnip test for market definition in the context of merger cases where firms produce multiple differentiated products. The test developed here represents an extension and generalization of the Katz-Shapiro and...

We examine the role of private information on the impact of vertical mergers. A vertical merger can improve the information that is available to an upstream monopolist because, after the merger, the monopolist can observe the cost of its downstream merger partner. In the pre-merger world,...

This article explains the inherent loss of an indirect competitor and reduction in competition when a vertical merger raises input foreclosure concerns. We then calculate a measure of the effective increase in the HHI measure of concentration for the downstream market, and we refer to this...