Merger Guidelines

The Draft Merger Guidelines Risk Reducing Innovation

The draft Merger Guidelines seek to reduce mergers and acquisitions, especially those that remove potential entrants. However, precluding acquisitions in those settings ignores both what incentivizes startups and investors to take initial risks, as well as the advantages that large incumbents have to parlay acquisitions into further innovation and an array of widely commercialized consumer products. The overall effect may dampen innovation, write Ginger Zhe Jin, Mario Leccese, and Liad Wagman.

How the FTC Could Have Used Its Draft Merger Guidelines To Argue Against Microsoft-Activision and Meta-Within

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban show how the Federal Trade Commission could have used its 2023 draft Merger Guidelines to focus its challenges against Microsoft-Activision and Meta-Within squarely on the pressing economic concern of protecting competition during critical technological transitions making full use of the law’s traditional incipiency standard.

Cory S. Capps and Leemore Dafny: A Conversation on the Draft Merger Guidelines

Cory S. Capps and Leemore Dafny provide their round-one comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

Carl Shapiro: Why Dropping Market Power from the Merger Guidelines Matters

Carl Shapiro provides his round-one comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

Dennis Carlton: Have the Draft Guidelines Demoted Economics?

Dennis Carlton provides his round-one comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

Closing the Gap in Merger Enforcement

Most mergers in industries with only a handful of competitors are anticompetitive, so why don’t we block them? The fix is to use a structural presumption to lower the burden for regulators.

The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...

Did the Supreme Court Fix “Brown Shoe”?

The Supreme Court’s 1962 Brown Shoe decision, which found a merger to be anticompetitive even though it would have reduced prices for...

Why the Antitrust Agencies Should Consider Prior Bad Acts in Merger Review

As the federal antitrust agencies consider revising the merger guidelines, they should add consideration of the merging parties’ previous bad acts, write...

LATEST NEWS

The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Will Not Help Grocery Competition

Kroger and Albertsons say they need to merge to compete with Walmart. Claire Kelloway argues that what they really want is Walmart’s monopsony power, and permitting mergers on these grounds will only harm suppliers, workers, and consumers.

Innovators Respond to Their Presidential Candidate Winning With More Innovation

Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.

Letter to the Editor: Former FTC and DOJ Chief Economists Urge Separation of Economic and Legal Analysis in Merger Guidelines

Seventeen former chief economists of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division urge current Agency heads to separate the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines to strengthen the role of the latter in merger review.

Why the Kroger-Albertsons Merger Is a Mess for Consumers

Grocers Kroger and Albertsons want to merge, which would make them the second biggest retail food chain and, according to them, enhance their ability to compete with Walmart and Costco and offer lower prices to consumers. Christine P. Bartholomew writes that the promises of more competition and lower prices for consumers are unlikely to manifest, and thus the Federal Trade Commission should block the deal.  

After Neoliberalism

The following is an excerpt from Martin Daunton's new book, "The Economic Government of the World: 1933-2023," out November 14.