We study the consumer welfare effects of mergers in airline networks. Based on the development of a general classification of affected routes, we apply a difference-indifferences approach to exemplarily investigate the price effects of the America West Airlines - US Airways merger completed in...

We hypothesize a particular source of cartel instability and explore its relevance to understanding cartel dynamics. The cartel instability is rooted in the observation that, upon cartel formation, the relative positions of firms are often fixed which may lead some growthconscious members to be...

Theoretical research has investigated the relevance of entry-inducing effects as countervailing factor to a merger-related increase in market power. We use route-level data for the America West Airlines - US Airways merger (2005) to investigate whether such an effect can be identified...

The paper develops a four-step framework to detect anticompetitive horizontal mergers. In the first step, an estimate of the impact of the merger on the market price needs to be derived. Subsequent, the second step of the framework has to assess whether such a predicted price increase would be...

The paper aims at assessing the costs and benefits of antitrust enforcement. The analysis starts with an investigation of why competition is typically worth protecting followed by a collection of empirical evidence which shows that competition actually needs protection by antitrust policy in...

The last couple of years have seen an increasing interest in critical loss analysis, both, in academia and in practice. This development is documented by various research papers, high-level exchanges between antitrust experts as well as an increasing number of case decisions which make use of...

Im Jahre 2005 fand im Rahmen eines OECD Policy Roundtables ein intensiver Meinungsaustausch der Mitgliedsstaaten zu dem Thema ‚Evaluation of the Actions and Resources of the Competition Authorities’ statt. Eine wesentliche Erkenntnis der Gespräche bestand in der Feststellung, dass...