Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Afterword: Could A Merger Lead To Both A Monopoly And A Lower Price?, Alan A. Fisher Ph.D., Robert H. Lande, Walter Vandaele

All Faculty Scholarship

This article demonstrates that significant net efficiencies from a merger could cause prices to decrease, even if the merger results in a monopoly. The article also shows that a price focus would require substantially more efficiencies to justify an otherwise anticompetitive merger than would an efficiency focus (in other words, it re-does the Williamsonian merger tradeoff, using price to consumers instead of net efficiencies as its focus). We demonstrate this by calculating how large the necessary efficiency gains would have to be to prevent price increases under different market conditions.

Efficiency Considerations In Merger Enforcement, Alan A. Fisher Ph.D., Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

This is one of the first articles to demonstrate that the primary goal of antitrust is neither exclusively to enhance economic efficiency, nor to address any social or political factor. Rather, the overriding intent behind the merger laws was to prevent prices to purchasers from rising due to mergers (a wealth transfer concern). This is the first article to show how to analyze mergers with this goal in mind. Doing so challenges the fundamental underpinnings of Williamsonian merger analysis (which assumes mergers should be evaluated only in terms of net efficiency effects).

In this and three related articles we re-do …