antitrust and competition

The European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines give a central role to dynamic competition in merger review. Some scholars have criticized dynamic competition as an analytical tool that seems to always discourage government intervention, given how quickly and unexpectedly—or dynamically—innovation can remake a market. Nicolas Petit, Selcukhan Unekbas, Bowman Heiden, and Pierre Regibeau argue this critique ignores the several large cases in which regulators used dynamic competition to intervene in a merger.

The draft EU Merger Guidelines open merger analysis to non-economic considerations, including choice, supply chain resilience, and sustainability. However, they do not yet explain how these considerations will be paired with a traditional consumer welfare analysis of price and quantity. Maciej Bernatt and Simbarashe Tavuyanago look to South Africa to devise a “vulnerable consumer test” that can help bridge these economic and non-economic goals.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s argument that businesses need to be able to easily switch between artificial intelligence models is correct but elides the fact,...

In new research, Vishavdeep Sharma and Krishnendu Ghosh Dastidar analyze corporate corruption through the lens of market competition. Firms often bribe officials to block rivals from entering their markets, and their incentive to do so depends less on how competitive a market is than on what kind of competition it has.

The European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines strengthen competition enforcement by acknowledging the potential harms of market concentration to society, including worker bargaining power and more vulnerable democratic institutions. However, Max von Thun and Claire Lavin argue that this progress is undermined by the introduction of a bias for scale and efficiency loopholes, which give large corporations more paths to complete a merger.

In new research, Wei Cai, Andrea Prat, and Jiehang Yu evaluate how mergers affect employee satisfaction. They find that acquired firms report a decline in worker satisfaction, primarily revolving around “soft” benefits, such as workplace culture, management quality, and trust.

The competitiveness of the artificial intelligence market at first glance masks how investment arrangements and partnerships between the largest players risks undermining their incentives to compete. Regulators must continue to monitor these arrangements for anticompetitive effects, writes Shishene Jing.

In new research, Xiao Dong, Paul Koh, Devesh Raval, Dominic Smith, and Brett Wendling evaluate how well divestiture remedies work for mergers in the supermarket industry. They find that past supermarket divestitures lead to lower employment, reduced sales, and higher rates of exit from the market relative to comparable non-divested supermarkets.  

The European Union’s draft Merger Guidelines assign multiple meanings to several key terms, making competition enforcement less predictable. Anouk van der Veer, Max van Iersel, and Giorgio Monti explore the Guideline’s inconsistent use of three of these terms: competitiveness, dynamic, and capabilities.

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.