No Abstract

Individual Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cases invariably raise broad questions about consumers, markets, and effective enforcement policy. Recent consumer protection cases raise questions about information regulation. Horizontal merger enforcement has recently focused on retrospective analysis...

We are given a lot of tools, but no warning label on how or when to employ them. Michael Doane (Competition Economics, LLC), Luke Froeb & Steven Tschantz (Vanderbilt University)

We analyze the bias from predicting merger effects using structural models of price competition when firms actually compete using both price and promotion. We extend the standard merger simulation framework to allow for competition over both price and promotion and ask what happens if we ignore...

A patent owner is entitled to recover any additional profits that would have been earned but for infringement. This paper suggests the use of an adaptation of merger simulation to assess lost profits in patent infringement cases. A model of the industry with infringement is calibrated to...

Simulation offers a rigorous methodology for addressing policy or litigation issues that require a comparison of an observed state of the world with an unobserved one. Simulation employs a calibrated, structural oligopoly model to describe the unobserved state of the world. Calibration involves...

In this paper, we study mergers in oral or second-price auctions and compare them to mergers in sealed-bid or first-price auctions. We use an adaptation of the logit qualitative choice model to characterize the underlying bidder value distributions. In second-price auctions, this model has a...