The techniques used by the economic expert witnesses in FTC v. Whole Foods Market illustrate the sophistication and complexity of modern empirical merger analysis. In this issue of Antitrust, we explain the intuition behind these techniques and discuss how the results can be used to assess the...

The variety of empirical methods that can be applied to assess the competitive implications of proposed mergers has increased over time. This is due, in part, to the greater availability of data of all types, ranging from specific transaction level data collected at the retail store to aggregate...

The US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission receive notification regarding thousands of mergers per year, and must identify, from the entire set of mergers, those that require further investigation. Merger screens are critical to efficient and effective merger enforcement policy,...

Scripting is a widely-used way to automate the execution of tasks. Despite the popularity of scripting, it remains difficult to use for both beginners and experts: because of the cryptic commands for the first group, and incompatible syntaxes across different systems, for the latter group. The...