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Competitive Harm From Vertical Mergers, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Competitive Harm From Vertical Mergers, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The antitrust enforcement Agencies' 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines introduce a nontechnical application of bargaining theory into the assessment of competitive effects from vertical acquisitions. The economics of such bargaining is complex and can produce skepticism among judges, who might regard its mathematics as overly technical, its game theory as excessively theoretical or speculative, or its assumptions as unrealistic.
However, we have been there before. The introduction of concentration indexes, particularly the HHI, in the Merger Guidelines was initially met with skepticism but gradually they were accepted as judges became more comfortable with them. The same thing very largely happened again …
Analyzing Vertical Mergers: Accounting For The Unilateral Effects Tradeoff And Thinking Holistically About Efficiencies, Roger D. Blair, Christine Wilson, D. Daniel Sokol, Keith Klovers, Jeremy Sandford
Analyzing Vertical Mergers: Accounting For The Unilateral Effects Tradeoff And Thinking Holistically About Efficiencies, Roger D. Blair, Christine Wilson, D. Daniel Sokol, Keith Klovers, Jeremy Sandford
UF Law Faculty Publications
With the adoption of the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines, the U.S. antitrust agencies have updated their guidance on vertical mergers for the Twenty-First Century. Although economists have long recognized the procompetitive benefits most vertical mergers generate, the law has not always followed suit, and has sometimes condemned vertical mergers for making the merged firm more efficient. In this article, we attempt to catalogue the extensive list of efficiencies that vertical mergers can generate, trace the often halting efforts to incorporate these insights into the law, and propose a framework that courts and agencies can use to assess the likely competitive …