Merger Efficiencies and Competition Policy

Frederic Michael Scherer

Scholarly Articles from Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Abstract: Since the United States changed its guidelines in 1984, many industrialized nations have included efficiencies defenses in their rules for judging whether mergers and other activities that might lessen competition are on balance desirable. This paper was written for an OECD competition policy conference in Paris October 25, 2012. It presents the standard Williamson “tradeoff†analysis and explores why consumer price benefits might be required in the current economic environment, with its substantial unemployment and Keynesian liquidity traps that limit the reinvestment of efficiency-based profits in additional output. It also explores the difficulty of assessing efficiency benefits in advance of mergers and suggests alternative approaches to the problem.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in HKS Faculty Working Paper Series

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9830356/RWP12-048_Scherer.pdf (application/pdf)

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:hrv:hksfac:9830356

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard Kennedy School of Government Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().