Reinvigorating Horizontal Merger Enforcement

Merger Enforcement

The challenge of effective merger enforcement is tremendous. U.S. antitrust agencies must, by statute, quickly forecast the competitive effects of mergers that occur in virtually every sector of the economy to determine if mergers can proceed. Surprisingly, given the complexity of the regulators task, there is remarkably little empirical evidence on the effects of mergers to guide regulators. T...

Revising the Horizontal Merger Guidelines

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are currently in the process of revising their Horizontal Merger Guidelines. I explain that if a revision is to occur, then there are certain parts of the Guidelines that are most in need of revision, including the sections on unilateral and coordinated effects, committed and uncommitted entry, numerical concentration thresholds fo...

Merger enforcement in two - sided markets ∗

This paper studies mergers in two-sided markets by estimating a structural supply and demand model and performing counterfactual experiments. The analysis is performed on data for a merger wave in U.S. radio that occurred between 1996 and 2006. The paper makes two main contributions. First, I identify the conflicting incentives of merged firms to exercise market power on both sides of the marke...

Horizontal Merger Guidelines (08/19/2010)

Entry Deterrence by Non-Horizontal Merger

We study when and how pure non-horizontal mergers, whether cross-product or vertical, can deter new entry. Organizational mergers implicitly commit firms to more aggressive price competition. Because heightened competition deters entry, mergers can occur in equilibrium even when, absent entry considerations, they do not. We show that, in order to prevent a flood of entrants, mergers arise even ...