Contrary to the suggestion of Williamson (1968), a merger enhancing total social welfare through the creation of substantial efficiencies nevertheless may violate current antitrust law in the United States, which considers only the effects of mergers on consumers. To avoid violating antitrust...

In recent years divergence between United States ("US") and European Union ("EU") competition policy has garnered a lot of attention. One particular area where these differences are evident is the treatment of vertical restraints. In the USA, an antitrust plaintiff must show that a vertical...

In this paper, we derive estimators of, and closed-form (non-integral) expressions for, the distribution of bids in an extreme value, asymmetric, second-price, private-values auction. In equilibrium, prices (winning bids) and shares (winning probabilities) have a simple monotonic...

In this paper, we examine price movements over time around the collapse of a bid-rigging conspiracy. While the mean decreased by sixteen percent, the standard deviation increased by over two hundred percent. We hypothesize that conspiracies in other industries would exhibit similar...

A raft of articles offered contrasting views on analytic tools for assessing unilateral effects from differentiated products mergers. We revisit this debate to clarify the issues and place them in context. We consider the choice among analytic tools at three stages of a merger assessment -...

We propose a simple method for predicting price effects from mergers between branded retail chains competing in many local markets. When past mergers created markets with the same number of brands but different numbers of brand owners, price data at a single point in time exhibit between-market...

We examine the role of competition and mergers in bargaining by embedding a performance game, in which retail prices are determined by competition, into an axiomatic bilateral bargaining model, in which suppliers and retailers negotiate wholesale terms. We prove existence and uniqueness of what...

The Obama Administration's Council of Economic Advisers expressed concern that competition was threatened by increasing industry concentration. Academics, commentators, and journalists have joined the chorus. But none demonstrated increasing concentration of meaningful markets, as are used in...

Previous iterations of the DOJ/FTC Merger Guidelines have articulated a clear, rigorous, and transparent methodology for balancing the pro-competitive benefits of mergers against their anticompetitive costs. By describing agency practice, guidelines facilitate compliance, ensure consistent and...

For 181 million Americans not on Medicare or Medicaid but insured through their employer, labor union, or private insurance health plan, the primary restraints on pharmaceutical prices are pharmaceutical benefit managers (PBMs) who administer health plan drug benefits. PBMs use the aggregate...