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...

Within the last three years, Google has acquired YouTube and DoubleClick and has attempted to control part of Yahoo!'s search advertising business. Two of the deals have not raised antitrust concerns by competition authorities. I review these deals with a focus on consumer welfare. Consumers are...

The paper assesses the impact of the detection of a hard-core cartel in the Swiss market for road surfacing on post-cartel competition. In addition to an investigation of supply-side factors, demand-side factors, and market prices, the paper also derives estimates of the economic effects of the...

The paper develops a framework to enforce anti-predation rules that explicitly takes the intervention stage into account. In particular, it is proposed to improve predation enforcement by focusing on two channels: refining the current regime, and amending it. With respect to the refinement of...

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...

This paper contains an economic and legal analysis of the lawsuit Microsoft vs. U.S. Department of Justice beginning with the District Court's decision on June 7, 2000 up to the Proposed Final Judgement on November 6, 2001. I found that the courts' underlying economic paradigm regarding the...

An increasingly important part of contemporary merger control both in the US and the EU is unilateral effects analysis, particularly with regard to oligopolistic mergers. In practice, this requires econometric analyses of past market data and, above all, the construction of simulation models in...

The recent Impala Judgment by the CFI on the Sony/BMG Decision by the Commission represents the most important ruling on collective dominance since Airtours. We review both the Decision and the Judgment and derive implications for the institutional and substantive development of EU Merger...

The market developments in international air transportation have led to the dominance of three global airline alliances - Star, SkyTeam and oneworld. At the same time, members of these alliances receive increasingly more freedom in coordinating various aspects of joint operations, including...

The paper characterises the building blocks of a framework to enforce antipredation rules and subsequently evaluates selected enforcement options in a Cournot-type duopoly predation model. Differentiating between a no rule approach, an ex ante approach and two ex post approaches, it is shown...