The downstream effects of mergers between manufacturers of differentiated consumer products are partly determined by the relationship between the merging manufacturers and retailers. That relationship may be such that the retail price effects of the merger are exactly those if the manufacturers...

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...

We study mergers among firms that compete by simultaneously choosing price and location. The merged firm moves its two products away from each other to reduce cannibalization, and the non-merging firms move their products in between the merging firm's products. Post-merger repositioning...

On January 10, 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission issued a Request for Information on Merger Enforcement designed to elicit input in the preparation of guidelines replacing both the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines and the 2019 Vertical Merger Guidelines. The RFI...

The legality of a horizontal merger under section 7 of the Clayton Act turns on a reckoning of its social costs and benefits. This paper reviews what economics has to say about that reckoning and explores the relationship between economic learning and merger law and policy

On July 18, 2023, the Agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust law relating to mergers—the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission—published draft Merger Guidelines (dMGs) for comment. This comment reflects cumulative experience from four decades as an enforcer, from...

The European Commission sought public comment on a revision of its Notice on the definition of the relevant market. Among other things, this contribution advises the Commission to: acknowledge the analytic purpose served by the relevant market in competitive assessment; apply the hypothetical...

This paper explains how basic microeconomics can be used to assess lost profits from patent infringement. The main suggested analysis is an adaptation of merger simulation. Observed prices and quantities are combined with estimated demand parameters to calibrate a model of the industry with...

Robert Crandall and Clifford Winston set out to review and enlarge the body of scholarly evidence on the effect of antitrust policy on consumer prices. They ignore, however, the great weight of evidence supporting the two core elements of antitrust policy - criminal prosecution of cartel...

Inconvenient truths prevent econometric merger retrospective studies from substantially altering our understanding of competitive effects from horizontal mergers. Econometrics cannot definitively determine the effects of particular mergers, and if they could, econometric merger retrospectives...