We present a Chandra observation of the merging cluster of galaxies Abell 2744. The cluster shows strong evidence for an ongoing major merger which we believe to be responsible for the radio halo. X-ray emission and temperature maps of the cluster, combined with the spatial and redshift distribution of the galaxies, indicate a roughly north-south axis for the merger, with a significant velocity...

The merger of rural primary care and home health services offers the potential for increasing the administrative efficiency of health care, and thereby enhancing the quality of care and increasing access to services, particularly health promotion. However, the proposed benefits of any merger can only be realized if the merger process is successfully completed. An analysis of the factors that we...

Traditional merger analysis, based on market definition and use of concentration measures to infer potential anti-competitive effects, is problematic and difficult to implement when evaluating mergers in industries with differentiated products. This paper discusses an alternative which consists of a front-end estimation of demand and back-end use of a model of post-merger conduct to simulate th...

Since the publication by Williamson (1968) of his seminal paper on antitrust there has been a growing recognition by regulators of the need to assess tradeoffs between merger-related efficiency gains and merger-induced increases in market power. This paper addresses that need by presenting a structural econometric model of recent mergers in the U.S. rail industry. The paper extends the structur...

We investigate the competitive effects of the merger between Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines (2009) in the domestic U.S. airline industry. Applying fixed effects regression models we find that the transaction led to short term price increases of about 11 percent on overlapping routes and about 10 percent on routes which experienced a merger-induced switch of the operating carrier. Over a...

The influence of firms’ ability to employ individualized pricing on the welfare consequences of horizontal mergers is examined in location models. In a two-to-one merger, the merger reduces consumer surplus more when firms can price discriminate based on individual preferences compared to when they cannot. However, the opposite holds true in a three-to-two merger, in which the reduction in cons...

This paper reports an experiment conducted to examine the effects of changing the form of strategic interactions (Bertrand or Cournot), and changing underlying information conditions on the usefulness of the ‘ALM,’ a merger simulation device used by the U.S. Department of Justice. The experiment consists of twenty 60-period quadropolies. After period 40 a merger is induced. Behaviorally, Courno...

In this paper, we assess the appropriate treatment of buyer power inmerger review. We conclude that, for changes in bargaining outcomes due to a buyer merger to create efficiencies, it must be the case that, post-merger, the parties are able to arrive at a more optimal price schedule, perhaps due to reduced transactions costs. Empirical tests will be important to the evaluation of such efficien...