Merger enforcement today relies on settlements more than litigation to resolve anti-competitive concerns. The impact of settlement policy on welfare and the proper goals of settlement policy are highly controversial. Some argue that gun-shy agencies settle for too little while others argue that...

On March 20, 2011, wireless provider AT&T announced its intention to merge with T-Mobile USA, a competing wireless provider. This article reviews the economic analysis of this proposed acquisition that we carried out for Sprint and explains why the merger would have been anticompetitive. We...

In my earlier article, I proposed the "Protected Profits Benchmark" (PPB) price standard for determining whether or not a vertically integrated monopolist is engaged in a refusal to deal or price squeeze in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The PPB would be used where market benchmarks...

In this short and mainly expository article, we explain the “hypothetical monopolist test” that has become the standard methodology for identifying relevant antitrust markets in merger cases, and discuss two approaches to implementing the test. We then focus on the implementation of the test...

Private antitrust litigation often involves a dominant firm being accused of exclusionary conduct by a smaller rival. In such cases, the defendant generally has a much larger financial stake in the outcome. We explore the implications of this asymmetry in a model of litigation with endogenous...

The FTC and DOJ requested comments on their draft Vertical Merger Guidelines in January 2020. This article is a complete alternative set of suggested Vertical Merger Guidelines that reflects and supplements the approach explained in the comments submitted by the author along with Jonathan....