Natural experiments may serve as a test of an economic theory that purports to evaluate the competitive effects of a proposed transaction and therefore play an important role in merger analysis. Using aggregate reviews of Federal Trade Commission merger studies, it is possible to identify a...

At first glance, lawyers remain in control of price fixing analysis. Agreements to raise price are per-se illegal, and economists only seem needed to estimate damages. However, economic insights remain relevant; not all price-related agreements are driven by pricing issues and some price...

The European Union (EU) and the United States (US) enforce the world's two best known merger policies. The EU addresses transactions that are likely to impede effective competition, historically, with some type of dominance analysis, while the US focuses on mergers that are likely to...

In 1989, Barry Harris & Joseph Simons developed a quantitative method to implement the Horizontal Merger Guidelines' hypothetical monopolist test with a market-level “critical loss” analysis. The appeal of Harris & Simons' framework is that it created a simple, intuitive approach to...

The hypothetical monopolist test has been used to define antitrust markets for over 20 years. However, many of these applications occur within the enforcement agencies and thus the implementation process is not fully transparent to antitrust practitioners. This paper provides a study of 116...

This paper presents an analysis of merger enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission under the 1992 Merger Guidelines. Econometric analysis suggests that enforcement decisions are best predicted with the Herfindahl when the relevant theory is collusion and the number of significant rivals when...

The staff at an antitrust agency can focus on either coordinated interaction (collusion) or unilateral effects theories when investigating a proposed merger. This paper statistically models whether the choice of economic theory materially affects the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) enforcement...

More than ten years after the European merger policy reform, sufficient data has been accumulated to explore the impact of the reform on the difference between the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) merger policy. We expect policies to converge following the EU 2004 reform that...

In merger analysis, ease of entry, when present, trumps competitive concerns and allows market behavior, such as a merger, to proceed unchallenged. Thus, entry plays a key role in every antitrust study. That said, it is surprising that entry analysis is inconsistently defined, both in the courts...

The modern Merger Guidelines have controlled merger policy for over three decades. Economic theory has evolved (and continues to evolve) and revisions of the Merger Guidelines have integrated some of these considerations into the merger review methodology. This paper tabulates and evaluates...