A Consumer Surplus Defense in Merger Control

Sven-Olof Fridolfsson

No 686, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: A government wanting to promote an efficient allocation of resources as measured by the total surplus, should strategically delegate to its competition authority a welfare standard with a bias in favour of consumers. A consumer bias means that some welfare increasing mergers will be blocked. This is optimal, if the relevant alternative to the merger is another change in market structure that will even further increase the total surplus. Furthermore, a consumer bias is shown to enhance welfare even though it blocks some welfare increasing mergers when the relevant alternative is the status quo.

Keywords: Merger Control; Competition Policy; Consumer Surplus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L11 L13 L41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2007-01-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ind and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifn.se/Wfiles/wp/wp686.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: A Consumer Surplus Defense in Merger Control (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0686

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().