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Full-Text Articles in Antitrust and Trade Regulation
The Dragon In The Room: China's Anti-Monopoly Law And International Merger Review, Christopher Hamp-Lyons
The Dragon In The Room: China's Anti-Monopoly Law And International Merger Review, Christopher Hamp-Lyons
Vanderbilt Law Review
In a world where mergers affect every corner of the planet, any government seeking competitive markets has an interest in ensuring that these mergers are not harmful to competition. As China, the world's most populous country, has committed to a market economy, it has now taken the momentous step of enacting its own Anti- Monopoly Law ("AML"). This effects a dramatic change in the antitrust regulation of multinational mergers. In international antitrust, even subtle legal differences between jurisdictions create significant potential for conflict. For this reason, the advent of antitrust merger review by a country with such massive international economic …
Analyzing Horizontal Mergers: Unilateral Effects In Product-Differentiated Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Analyzing Horizontal Mergers: Unilateral Effects In Product-Differentiated Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay offers a brief, non-technical exposition of the antitrust analysis of horizontal mergers in product differentiated markets where the resulting price increase is thought to be unilateral - that is, only the post-merger firm increases its prices while other firms in the market do not. More realistically, non-merging firms who are reasonably close in product space to the merging firm will also be able to increase their prices when the post-merger firm's prices rise. The unilateral effects theory is robust and has become quite conventional in merger analysis. There is certainly no reason for thinking that it involves any …
Mergers And Market Dominance, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Mergers And Market Dominance, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Mergers involving dominant firms legitimately receive close scrutiny under the antitrust laws, even if they involve tiny firms. Further, they should be examined closely even in markets that generally exhibit low entry barriers. Many of the so-called "unilateral effects" cases in current merger law are in fact mergers that create dominant firms. The rhetoric of unilateral effects often serves to disguise this fact by presenting the situation as if it involves the ability of a small number of firms (typically two or three) in a much larger market to increase their price to unacceptable levels. In fact, if such a …
Antitrust More Than A Century After Sherman: Why Protecting Competitors Promotes Competition More Than Economically Efficient Mergers, Andreas Koutsoudakis
Antitrust More Than A Century After Sherman: Why Protecting Competitors Promotes Competition More Than Economically Efficient Mergers, Andreas Koutsoudakis
Andreas Koutsoudakis, Esq.
The evolution of antitrust laws in the United States, from the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 to the Hart-Scott Rodino Antitrust Improvement Act of 1976, has been disrupted throughout this country’s history by a dispute as to whether antitrust legislation passed by the United States Congress (“Congress”) should have broad or narrow implications with regards to a merger between two companies. Historically, Congress has enacted antitrust legislation with broad implications, and the United States Supreme Court (“Court”) has applied the legislation narrowly. Thus, disagreement between these two branches of the United States government has existed, creating an obstacle to the …
Efficiencies In Merger Analysis: Alchemy In The Age Of Empiricism?, Thomas L. Greaney
Efficiencies In Merger Analysis: Alchemy In The Age Of Empiricism?, Thomas L. Greaney
All Faculty Scholarship
One is hard-pressed to find in law an undertaking more fraught with uncertainty than the application of the efficiencies defense in merger analysis. Generalist fact finders (judges) and politically-attuned government officials (prosecutors and regulators) are charged with two Herculean tasks: (1) predicting the outcome of organic changes in business enterprises and (2) comparing the magnitude of those changes to the equally uncertain amount of harm to future competition that the transaction will cause. Given the enormous, perhaps intractable, uncertainty of this inquiry, it is therefore paradoxical that many of the strongest advocates for strengthening the role of efficiencies analysis in …