Over the period 2015-2017, the five giant technologically leading firms, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) acquired 175 companies, from small start-ups to billion dollar deals. By investigating this intense M&A, this paper ambitions a better understanding of the Big Five's...

Critical observers state that current antitrust policies fall short of addressing the wider societal implications of a market economy, inter alia in merger control. The interests of employees in decent wages, merger impacts on the environment, or the pursuit of a governmental industrial policy...

We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger profitability of targets, a decrease in the size of acquirers,...

The final destination and the ultimate goal that we put forth in our article is that the Turkish Competition Board should include innovation considerations in its merger control analyses by employing dynamic tools. Accordingly, we contend that the Turkish Competition Board should “set its...

Recent merger cases involving the transfer of control over “big data” concluded that these mergers would not lead to competition problems because there was a sufficient number of other data sources available to the various players in the market. These merger cases implicitly accepted, but...

We study the evolution of the EC's merger decision procedure over the first 25 years of European competition policy. Using a novel dataset constructed at the level of the relevant markets and containing all merger cases over the 1990-2014 period, we evaluate how consistently arguments related to...

Innovation can either be viewed by the competition authorities as a parameter that should be protected from the potential negative effects of a transaction, or it can be utilized by the merging parties as part of a defense argument to set off against or abate the anticompetitive concerns raised...

Merging firms regularly argue that mergers involving capacity-constrained firms are unlikely to be anti-competitive, because the incentive for the merged firm to raise prices and reduce quantity may not be strong enough to generate slack in the capacity constraints and lead to higher prices. We...

The institutional design of federal merger review in the United States leads to systematic underenforcement of merger law. This is so even though substantive merger law is relatively well settled, most mergers are not anticompetitive, and the review process properly permits them to proceed...

It is hardly news to note that companies around the world have recently engaged in an escalating arms race with respect to data collection and that they have been using data collection and processing as a major growth strategy. The quickest and most efficient way for undertakings to access...