Law Commons^™

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 …