antitrust and competition

The European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines assign multiple meanings to several key terms, making competition enforcement less predictable. Anouk van der Veer, Max van Iersel, and Giorgio Monti explore the Guideline’s inconsistent use of three of these terms: competitiveness, dynamic, and capabilities.

The European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines consider import competition from foreign rivals to be a powerful competitive constraint on domestic producers, thus easing clearance for mergers between those domestic competitors. This stipulation ignores how a merger between domestic rivals can lead to subsequent trade barriers, writes Felix Montag.

Change is the core theme of the European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines, which seek to embed flexibility into merger assessment to account for the...

Although the European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines acknowledge that consolidation in digital platforms can harm the democratic process, they need to up their efforts to protect media competition and a quality public sphere. Vicky Robertson provides three steps to rectify this oversight.

The European Commission draft merger guidelines reorient merger analysis to focus on “capabilities”: how firms compete in current markets and pivot to future ones. However, the guidelines combine “capabilities” with what strategic management scholars call “resources.” This erroneous amalgamation oversimplifies merger assessment and risks inaccurate analysis, writes Selcukhan Unekbas.

The caution of Judge Amit Mehta’s remedy in the Google Search case is unlikely to open internet search to competition. Steve Salop recommends several amendments to the remedy that can improve competition without undercutting the revenue that has benefited Google’s partners to date.

In new research, Anik Bhaduri discusses how current antitrust enforcement is insufficient to address the economic influence of Big Tech companies. He argues that their market power stems from their privileged position on financial markets and their unique organizational structures, and antitrust reforms should therefore be complemented with reforms to corporate and securities law to effectively address the concentration of private power.

The antitrust agencies’ revival of the Robinson-Patman Act risks undercutting legitimate business practices that benefit consumers. However, there is a role the Act can play in protecting small businesses, writes Darren Tucker.

In February, the Federal Trade Commission settled with pharmaceutical benefits manager (PBM) Express Scripts. The FTC had sued Express Scripts and two other large PBMs under the long dormant Section 5 of the FTC Act, which targets “unfair methods of competition.” The settlement suggests that the FTC may succeed in addressing the convoluted contracts between PBMs, drug manufacturers, health insurers, and employers that drive up drug prices for Americans. It also opens unchartered territory for antitrust enforcement and the limits of Section 5, argue Fiona Scott Morton and Mariah Smith.

In new research, Louis Pape and Michelangelo Rossi find that the European Union’s Digital Markets Act’s prohibition on self-preferencing had little effect on the popularity of Google Maps relative to competitors. User preference for the incumbent service appears to outweigh frictional barriers to access.