The European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines consider import competition from foreign rivals to be a powerful competitive constraint on domestic producers, thus easing clearance for mergers between those domestic competitors. This stipulation ignores how a merger between domestic rivals can lead to subsequent trade barriers, writes Felix Montag.

The Affiliate Fellows cohort at the Stigler Center at Chicago Booth is a multidisciplinary group of economists, business scholars, lawyers, and political scientists.

Change is the core theme of the European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines, which seek to embed flexibility into merger assessment to account for the...

Although the European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines acknowledge that consolidation in digital platforms can harm the democratic process, they need to up their efforts to protect media competition and a quality public sphere. Vicky Robertson provides three steps to rectify this oversight.

The European Commission draft merger guidelines reorient merger analysis to focus on “capabilities”: how firms compete in current markets and pivot to future ones. However, the guidelines combine “capabilities” with what strategic management scholars call “resources.” This erroneous amalgamation oversimplifies merger assessment and risks inaccurate analysis, writes Selcukhan Unekbas.

The European Commission’s draft merger Guidelines adopt the advice of the Draghi report on European Union competitiveness to tailor competition law to promote goals that have traditionally fallen under industrial, trade, and national security policy. Conceptual ambiguity and the convergence of these policy areas risk undermining consumer welfare, entrenching incumbents, and opening regulation to business capture, write Annika Stöhr and Oliver Budzinski.