scholarly journals Antitrust and Merger Policy: A Review and Critique

1987 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence J White
Keyword(s):  
Market Share ◽  
Market Definition ◽  
Merger Policy ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Important Advance ◽  
Merger Guidelines ◽  
Cost Efficiencies

This review will consider the Department of Justice Merger Guidelines of the 1980s, discussing market definition, market share concentration and entry conditions, consideration of other market characteristics, and cost efficiencies. It will also assess the application of the guidelines in practice. The merger guidelines are certainly not perfect, nor have they been applied perfectly. But they represent an important advance over that which preceded them, and they represent an exceedingly sensible way to think about merger enforcement and especially about market definition in a merger context. Policy has surely improved as a consequence of their development and application.

Input market definition under department of Justice Merger Guidelines

1989 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard S. Higgins ◽  
William F. Shughart
Keyword(s):  
Market Definition ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Merger Guidelines

Market Definition: Implementing the Department of Justice Merger Guidelines

1996 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 665-690
Author(s):  
David L. Kaserman ◽  
Hans Zeisel
Keyword(s):  
Economic Research ◽  
Market Definition ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Demand And Supply ◽  
Merger Guidelines ◽  
Empirical Level

My lament is that this battle on market definitions … has received virtually no attention from us economists. Except for a casual flirtation with cross elasticities of demand and supply, the determination of markets has remained an undeveloped area of economic research at either the theoretical or empirical level.

1. Competition policy and economics

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-48
Author(s):  
Richard Whish ◽  
David Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Market Power ◽  
Market Share ◽  
Competition Policy ◽  
Competition Law ◽  
Market Definition ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Market Shares ◽  
Competition Laws ◽  
Competition Process

This chapter provides an overview of competition law and its economic context. Section 2 describes the practices that competition laws attempt to control in order to protect the competition process. Section 3 examines the theory of competition and gives an introductory account of why the effective enforcement of competition law is thought to be beneficial. Section 4 considers the goals of competition law. Section 5 introduces two key economic concepts, market definition and market power, that are important to a better understanding of competition policy. The chapter concludes with a table of market share figures that are significant in the application of EU and UK competition law, while reminding the reader that market shares are only ever a proxy for market power and can never be determinative of market power in themselves.

Complementarities as an antitrust defense

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 344-366
Author(s):  
Dennis L. Weisman
Keyword(s):  
Numerical Simulations ◽  
Single Market ◽  
Horizontal Merger ◽  
Merger Policy ◽  
Cournot Model ◽  
Network Economy ◽  
Merger Guidelines ◽  
Wide Range

We employ a Cournot model with interdependent demands to explore the interaction between demand and cost complementarities in mitigating upward pricing pressure, post-merger. The analysis reveals that even substantial increases in the HHI post-merger need not raise competitive concerns when output is redistributed from single-market to multi-market providers. Furthermore, the numerical simulations indicate that there is a wide range of demand and cost complementarity parameters over which even monopolization of the market would not be expected to result in higher prices. These findings may constructively inform merger policy and provide useful context for application of the DOJ/FTC horizontal merger guidelines in an increasingly digitized (network) economy.

scholarly journals Judicial Response to the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
Carl Shapiro ◽  
Howard Shelanski
Keyword(s):  
Federal Trade Commission ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Market Concentration ◽  
Horizontal Merger ◽  
Average Increase ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Merger Guidelines ◽  
Direct Competition ◽  
The Government ◽  
The U.S

AbstractWe study how the courts have responded to the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. Looking at decided cases, we find that both the government and merging parties rely on the 2010 Guidelines in presenting their cases, each side respectively arguing that it should win if the court properly follows them . The 2010 Guidelines had the strongest effect on the case law in the area of unilateral effects, where a number of courts have embraced them in ways that clearly depart from earlier decisions. The case law now exhibits much greater receptivity to a government showing that the merger will lead to higher prices simply due to the loss of direct competition between the two merging firms. The courts also have followed the 2010 Guidelines by more willingly defining markets around targeted customers. We do not detect any effect on decided cases of the higher concentration thresholds found in the 2010 Guidelines. Both the average pre-merger level of market concentration and the average increase in market concentration alleged by the government in litigated cases to date declined after 2010 .

scholarly journals Merger Policy with Merger Choice

2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (2) ◽  
pp. 1006-1033 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Nocke ◽  
Michael D Whinston
Keyword(s):  
Market Share ◽  
Optimal Policy ◽  
Consumer Surplus ◽  
Merger Policy ◽  
Horizontal Mergers ◽  
Antitrust Authority

We analyze the optimal policy of an antitrust authority towards horizontal mergers when merger proposals are endogenous and firms choose among alternative mergers. In our model, the optimal policy of an antitrust authority that seeks to maximize expected consumer surplus imposes a tougher standard on “larger” mergers, i.e., those involving firms with a larger pre-merger market share. The optimal policy is a response to a bias in firms' proposal incentives: firms always propose a larger merger when it is better for consumers than a smaller one, but sometimes will propose the larger one even when it is worse for consumers.

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