Do Consumers Benefit from Concentration in the New Economy? A Review of Google's Mergers, Acquisitions, and Arrangements

Patrick Frank Ernst Beschorner

No 08-121, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Within the last three years, Google has acquired YouTube and DoubleClick and has attempted to control part of Yahoo!'s search advertising business. Two of the deals have not raised antitrust concerns by competition authorities. I review these deals with a focus on consumer welfare. Consumers are affected by being on one side of a multisided platform. Provided that better matches of search ads are beneficial, I demonstrate that the mergers may have positive effects for consumers through better matches between users and search ads. However, this does not substitute an in-depth antitrust assessment of the deals.

Keywords: merger control; multisided platforms; screening mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K21 L41 L42 M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:7511

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