The 2023 Merger Guidelines and The Role of Economics

Michael Salinger

Review of Industrial Organization, 2024, vol. 65, issue 1, No 9, 243-253

Abstract: Abstract Relying heavily on legal analysis, the 2023 Merger Guidelines argue for a fundamental shift in antitrust enforcement that places more emphasis on protecting competitors and less on protecting the beneficiaries of competition. It is up to courts, not economists, to ascertain whether this interpretation of antitrust law is correct. But economists can and should analyze the likely economic effects. Evidence that antitrust enforcement has permitted some markets to be overly concentrated justifies the tightening of horizontal merger enforcement that is signaled by these guidelines. Evaluating the elimination of double marginalization from vertical mergers as a part of an efficiency defense rather than as a primary economic effect reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics of vertical mergers. At a minimum, these guidelines will further damage the reputation of the DOJ and FTC among competition policy enforcers in other countries. A potentially more serious cost will be if foreign competition authorities use these guidelines to justify enforcing their own laws to protect inefficient domestic firms against foreign competition.

Keywords: Antitrust; Merger Guidelines; Horizontal Mergers; Vertical Mergers; L0; L4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11151-024-09957-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:revind:v:65:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1007_s11151-024-09957-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... on/journal/11151/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11151-024-09957-x

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Industrial Organization is currently edited by L.J. White

More articles in Review of Industrial Organization from Springer, The Industrial Organization Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().