There is considerable debate about the alternative economic approaches to merger control taken by competition authorities. However, differences in economic analysis are not the only reason for alternative decisions. We conduct an experiment in decision making in the context of merger appraisal,...

This article is motivated by a growing interest in the problem of merger control quality assessment. Remedies are one of the instruments of merger control and have a significant influence on the results of it. This paper aims to build and empirically evaluate a discrete choice model of merger...

This paper provides a comparative analysis of methods for the empirical ex post evaluation of merger control decisions. It develops a competition-policy oriented framework of assessment criteria for the leading evaluation methods and applies them to structural modeling and simulation,...

Roughly during the last decade, European Competition Policy has undergone a series of fundamental changes. All four areas - cartel policy, merger policy, abuse control, and state aid control - have been subject to a modernization process, which led to a focus on analysing the effects of...

The European competition policy can look back at a successful forty-year-old practice of application by the European Commission. However, the performance orientation in competition policy has become more and more important with increasing importance of so called positive integration. In a...

The literature identifies a significant drop in merger control enforcement activity on both sides of the Atlantic during the last decade. Furthermore, this drop in enforcement activity is convincingly connected to enforcement problems on the sides of the competition agencies. This paper goes...

We review the Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office Germany) decision on the proposed merger between Springer and ProSiebenSat.1 from an economic point of view. In doing so, it is not our goal to analyse whether the controversial decision by the Bundeskartellamt has been correct or flawed from...

Advanced economic instruments like simulation models are enjoying an increased popularity in practical antitrust. There is hope that they being quantitative predictive economic evidence can substitute for qualitative structural analysis and lead to unambiguous results. This paper demonstrates...

Advances in competition economics as well as in computational and empirical methods have offered the scope for the employment of merger simulation models in merger control procedures during the past almost 15 years. Merger simulation is, nevertheless, still a very young and innovative instrument...

We analyze evidence production in merger control as a delegation problem under an inquisitorial and an adversarial competition policy system. Agents' incentives to produce evidence depend critically on the action set of the decision maker. In an inquisitorial system, allowing ex ante for a...