Download or read book The Need to Measure the Effect of Merger Policy and How to Do It written by Dennis W. Carlton and published by BiblioGov. This book was released on 2013-06 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this article, I explain the inadequacy of our current state of knowledge regarding the effectiveness of antitrust policy towards mergers. I then discuss the types of data that one must collect in order to be able to perform an analysis of the effectiveness of antitrust policy. There are two types of data one requires in order to perform such an analysis. One is data on the relevant market pre and post merger. The second is data on the specific predictions of the government agencies about the market post-merger. A key point of this article is to stress how weak an analysis of only the first type of data is. The frequent call for retrospective studies typically envisions relying on just this type of data, but the limitations on the analysis are not well understood. As I explain below, retrospective studies that ask whether prices went up post merger are surprisingly poor guides for analyzing merger policy. It is only when the second type of data is combined with the first type that a reliable analysis of antitrust policy can be carried out. There is a need both to collect the necessary data and to analyze it correctly.
Download or read book The Need to Measure the Effect of Merger Policy and how to Do it written by Dennis W. Carlton and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Why We Need to Measure the Effect of Merger Policy and how to Do it written by Dennis W. Carlton and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this article, I explain the inadequacy of our current state of knowledge regarding the effectiveness of antitrust policy towards mergers. I then discuss the types of data that one must collect in order to be able to perform an analysis of the effectiveness of antitrust policy. There are two types of data one requires in order to perform such an analysis. One is data on the relevant market pre and post merger. The second is data on the specific predictions of the government agencies about the market post-merger. A key point of this article is to stress how weak an analysis of only the first type of data is. The frequent call for retrospective studies typically envisions relying on just this type of data, but the limitations on the analysis are not well understood. As I explain below, retrospective studies that ask whether prices went up post merger are surprisingly poor guides for analyzing merger policy. It is only when the second type of data is combined with the first type that a reliable analysis of antitrust policy can be carried out. There is a need both to collect the necessary data and to analyze it correctly.
Download or read book Why We Need to Measure the Effect of Merger Policy and How to Do It written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mergers Merger Control and Remedies written by John Kwoka and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive analysis of merger outcomes based on all empirical studies, with an assessment of the effectiveness of antitrust policy toward mergers. In recent decades, antitrust investigations and cases targeting mergers—including those involving Google, Ticketmaster, and much of the domestic airline industry—have reshaped industries and changed business practices profoundly. And yet there has been a relative dearth of detailed evaluations of the effects of mergers and the effectiveness of merger policy. In this book, John Kwoka, a noted authority on industrial organization, examines all reliable empirical studies of the effect of specific mergers and develops entirely new information about the policies and remedies of antitrust agencies regarding these mergers. Combined with data on outcomes, this policy information enables analysis of, and creates new insights into, mergers, merger policies, and the effectiveness of remedies in preventing anticompetitive outcomes. After an overview of mergers, merger policy, and a common approach to merger analysis, Kwoka offers a detailed analysis of the studied mergers, relevant policies, and chosen remedies. Kwoka finds, first and foremost, that most of the studied mergers resulted in competitive harm, usually in the form of higher product prices but also with respect to various non-price outcomes. Other important findings include the fact that joint ventures and code sharing arrangements do not result in such harm and that policies intended to remedy mergers—especially conduct remedies—are not generally effective in restraining price increases. The book's uniquely comprehensive analysis advances our understanding of merger decisions and policies, suggests policy improvements for competition agencies and remedies, and points the way to future research.
Download or read book How to Measure the Deterrence Effects of Merger Policy written by Pedro Pita Barros and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: "We show that the number of merger proposals (frequency-based deterrence) is a more appropriate indicator of underlying changes in merger policy than the relative anti-competitiveness of merger proposals (composition-based deterrence). This has strong implications for the empirical analysis of the deterrence effects of merger policy enforcement, and potential implications regarding how to reduce anti-competitive merger proposals." (author's abstract)
Download or read book The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity Revisited written by Josh Lerner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers contributions to questions relating to the economics of innovation and technological change. Central to the development of new technologies are institutional environments and among the topics discussed are the roles played by universities and the ways in which the allocation of funds affects innovation.
Download or read book Innovation Matters written by Richard J. Gilbert and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proposal for moving from price-centric to innovation-centric competition policy, reviewing theory and available evidence on economic incentives for innovation. Competition policy and antitrust enforcement have traditionally focused on prices rather than innovation. Economic theory shows the ways that price competition benefits consumers, and courts, antitrust agencies, and economists have developed tools for the quantitative evaluation of price impacts. Antitrust law does not preclude interventions to encourage innovation, but over time the interpretation of the laws has raised obstacles to enforcement policies for innovation. In this book, economist Richard Gilbert proposes a shift from price-centric to innovation-centric competition policy. Antitrust enforcement should be concerned with protecting incentives for innovation and preserving opportunities for dynamic, rather than static, competition. In a high-technology economy, Gilbert argues, innovation matters.
Download or read book The Determinants and Effects of Mergers written by Dennis C. Mueller and published by Cambridge, Mass. : Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain ; Königstein/Ts. : Verlag A. Hain. This book was released on 1980 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Antitrust Paradox written by Robert Bork and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important book on antitrust ever written. It shows how antitrust suits adversely affect the consumer by encouraging a costly form of protection for inefficient and uncompetitive small businesses.
Download or read book The Deterrence Effects of U S Merger Policy Instruments written by Joseph A. Clougherty and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We estimate the deterrence effects of U.S. merger policy instruments with respect to the composition and frequency of future merger notifications. Data from the Annual Reports by the U.S. DOJ and FTC allow industry based measures over the 1986-1999 period of the conditional probabilities for eliciting investigations, challenges, prohibitions, court-wins and court-losses: deterrence variables akin to the traditional conditional probabilities from the economics of crime literature. We find the challenge-rate to robustly deter future horizontal (both relative and absolute) merger activity; the investigation-rate to slightly deter relative-horizontal merger activity; the court-loss-rate to moderately affect absolute-horizontal merger activity; and the prohibition-rate and court-win-rate to not significantly deter future horizontal mergers. Accordingly, the conditional probability of eliciting an antitrust challenge (i.e., remedies and prohibitions) involves the strongest deterrence effect from amongst the different merger policy instruments.
Download or read book The Economic Assessment of Mergers Under European Competition Law written by Daniel Gore and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a clear, concise and practical overview of the key economic techniques and evidence employed in European merger control.
Download or read book Platforms Markets and Innovation written by Annabelle Gawer and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her pioneering book Platform Leadership (with Michael Cusumano), Gawer gave us the strategy of building coalitions of customers, suppliers, and complementors. Now, she brings together a number of the leading researchers in the area of platform strategy to give us a book that will be a key reference for both practitioners and academics. Adam Brandenburger, New York University, US Annabelle Gawer s collected volume of research shows that a vibrant community of scholars has arisen around platforms and innovation. Each of the chapters is first rate, with top researchers offering some of their latest work. This will be an indispensable book for students of innovation and technology management everywhere. Henry Chesbrough, University of California, Berkeley, US Annabelle Gawer s Platforms, Markets and Innovation is the first serious exploration of the critical but subtle role that platforms play in business, society and our personal lives. As digital technologies penetrate every nook and cranny of the world around us, we rely on platforms to both help us use the new technologies, as well as to organize new markets of innovation that add applications on top of the platforms and make them far more valuable. Dr Gawer s excellent book is designed to help us understand the mysterious nature of platforms. It brings together the insights of twenty-four experts around the world who contributed to the fourteen chapters of the book. Dr Gawer s book is invaluable to anyone trying to understand the nuanced nature of platforms, and their implications for the evolution of innovation in the 21st century. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM Academy of Technology, US The emergence of platforms is a novel phenomenon impacting most industries, from products to services. Industry platforms such as Microsoft Windows or Google, embedded within industrial ecosystems, have redesigned our industrial landscapes, upset the balance of power between firms, fostered innovation and raised new questions on competition and innovation. Annabelle Gawer presents cutting-edge contributions from 24 top international scholars from 19 universities across Europe, the USA and Asia, from the disciplines of strategy, economics, innovation, organization studies and knowledge management. The novel insights assembled in this volume constitute a fundamental step towards an empirically based, nuanced understanding of the nature of platforms and the implications they hold for the evolution of industrial innovation. The book provides an overview of platforms and discusses governance, management, design and knowledge issues. With a multidisciplinary approach, this book will strongly appeal to academics and advanced students in management, innovation, strategy, economics and design. It will also prove an enlightening read for business managers in IT industries.
Download or read book Prophylactic Merger Policy written by Herbert Hovenkamp and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important purpose of the antitrust merger law is to arrest certain anticompetitive practices or outcomes in their “incipiency.” Many Clayton Act decisions involving both mergers and other practices had recognized the idea as early as the 1920s. In Brown Shoe the Supreme Court doubled down on the idea, attributing to Congress a concern about a “rising tide of economic concentration” that must be halted “at its outset and before it gathered momentum.” The Supreme Court did not explain why an incipiency test was needed to address this particular problem. Once structural thresholds for identifying problematic mergers are identified there is no need to condemn mergers that fall below that threshold. In the future merger law could always be brought to bear if the relevant numbers became larger. But this does not mean that incipiency tests are unimportant. They properly have a different use than the one that the Supreme Court identified. A better use of incipiency tests is to prevent certain bad outcomes early when antitrust rules make it difficult or impossible to prevent them later. Today most mergers are challenged before they occur, based on models that rest on an assumption of profit maximization to predict post-merger performance. As a result, the feared post-merger conduct has not occurred either and the evidence pertains to predicted rather than actual effects. This makes it important to place some limits on merger law's prophylactic reach. First, the language of §7 requires causation -- a showing that the merger is what is likely to facilitate that feared anticompetitive conduct. Second, we must be satisfied that this conduct, if it should occur, will be both anticompetitive and difficult to reach through direct application of the antitrust laws. Third, the merger must raise a significant risk that the conduct will occur. Finally, as with all merger cases, there must not be offsetting gains that serve to justify the merger notwithstanding these threats to competition. This paper then applies these considerations to mergers threatening coordinated interaction, merges to monopoly or facilitating anticompetitive unilateral effects, vertical mergers, exclusionary IP acquisitions, and acquisitions of very small but highly innovative firms. The paper discusses some high profile transactions, including the AT&T/Time Warner acquisition, currently on appeal. In such situations the challenger applies widely accepted economic tools to estimate anticompetitive effects by considering how the merger would change the post-merger firm's profit-maximizing behavior. The AT&T/Time Warner opinion was wrong to credit the testimony of the firms' employees that they would not maximize profits subsequent to the transaction. That conclusion, if accepted and broadly applied, would undermine most of the basis for merger analysis today. Finally, the paper examines the recent Intellectual Ventures decision, now subject to appeal, which involves an allegedly anticompetitive acquisition of patents.
Download or read book The Effect of Mergers on Consumer Prices written by Orley Ashenfelter and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper we propose a method to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. horizontal merger policy and apply it to the study of five recent consumer product mergers. We selected the mergers from those that, from the public record, seemed to be most problematic for the antitrust agencies. Thus we estimate an upper bound on the likely price effect of completed mergers. Our study employs retail scanner data and uses familiar panel data program evaluation procedures to measure price changes. Our results indicate that four of the five mergers resulted in some increases in consumer prices, while the fifth merger had little effect.
Download or read book The Effects of Competition written by George Symeonidis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-01-18 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A theoretical and empirical study of the effects of competition across a broad range of industries. Policies to promote competition are high on the political agenda worldwide. But in a constantly changing marketplace, the effects of more intense competition on firm conduct, market structure, and industry performance are often hard to distinguish. This study combines game-theoretic models with empirical evidence from a "natural experiment" of policy reform. The introduction in the United Kingdom of the 1956 Restrictive Trade Practices Act led to the registration and subsequent abolition of explicit restrictive agreements between firms and the intensification of price competition across a range of manufacturing industries. An equally large number of industries were not affected by the legislation. Using data from before and after the 1956 act, this book compares the two groups of industries to determine the effect of price competition on concentration, firm and plant numbers, profitability, advertising intensity, and innovation. The book avoids two problems common to empirical studies of competition: how to measure the intensity of competition and how to unravel the links between competition and other variables. Because the change in the intensity of competition had an external cause, there is no need to measure the intensity of competition directly, and it is possible to identify one-way causal effects when estimating the impact of competition. The book also examines issues such as the industries in which collusion is more likely to occur; the effect of cartels and cartel laws on market structure and profitability; the links between competition, advertising, and innovation; and the constraints on the exercise of merger and antitrust policies.
Download or read book Essays in Competition Policy written by Aleksandra Khimich and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cartels Damages to the Economy: An Assessment for Developing Countries (Joint with Marc IVALDI, Toulouse School of Economics and CEPR and Frédéric JENNY, ESSEC Business School, Paris) : The detection and sanction of cartels traditionally remains of a high importance for developed anti-trust authorities because of a clear understanding of their potential harm, and therefore of the potential benefits of their deterrence. Nevertheless, developing countries often struggle to create or reinforce their competition authority - running an antitrust division is costly and the supportive evidence concerning the potential benefits is still missing. Present study provides the missing quantitative evidence. It offers an assessment of the aggregate economic harm caused by cartels in developing countries measured in terms of sales affected by collusive practices as well as in terms of cartel excess profits arising from overcharging consumers. The results suggest that the aggregate economic damage estimated in terms of cartels' excess profits can reach almost 1% when divided by the corresponding GDP. Furthermore, as the maximal annual probability of uncovering an already existing cartel is estimated to be around 24%, it is suggested that the actual economic harm exceeds our estimations at least fourfold. / Assessing the accuracy of merger guidelines' screening tools (Joint with Marc Ivaldi, Toulouse School of Economics and Jérôme Foncel, EQUIPPE, University of Lille) : Present study offers a comprehensive assessment of the accuracy of two tools proposed by the most advanced merger guidelines - the traditional HHI test and a more recent UPP test- and attempts to define the economic conditions that favor misleading predictions. Monte-Carlo simulations are used to create economies that are further employed to measure the effects of mergers and to evaluate the performance of the chosen evaluation tools. Results suggest that the HHI test being applied to a market with differentiated products has a very weak performance. In its' turn, the UPP test can also be quite misleading, even if one has perfect information on the main ingredients needed to compute it. It appears that some of type-I and type-II errors occur because the UPP-like tests by construction ignore the pricing pressure experienced by the merging partner. We demonstrate how this can be fixed by taking into account the corresponding cross pass-through rate. / The role of the cross pass-through effects in merger analysis : Present study demonstrates that the ignorance of the cross pass-through effect, and particularly of its sign, can lead to misleading conclusions in almost all stages of merger investigations, including the market definition procedure and the assessment of coordinated and unilateral effects. It offers an examination of the properties of the pass-through matrix in a sufficiently general framework that is convenient for horizontal merger analysis and derives the exact characteristics of both the demand and supply systems that affect the sign of the cross pass-through.
