Law Commons^™

Common Ownership And Executive Incentives: The Implausibility Of Compensation As An Anticompetitive Mechanism, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Mutual funds, pension funds and other institutional investors are a growing presence in U.S. equity markets, and these investors frequently hold large stakes in shares of competing companies. Because these common owners might prefer to maximize the values of their portfolios of companies, rather than the value of individual companies in isolation, this new reality has lead to a concern that companies in concentrated industries with high degrees of common ownership might compete less vigorously with each other than they otherwise would. But what mechanism would link common ownership with reduced competition? Some commentators argue that one of the most …

Anticompetitive Mergers In Labor Markets, Ioana Marinescu, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Indiana Law Journal

Mergers of competitors are conventionally challenged under the federal antitrust laws when they threaten to lessen competition in some product or service market in which the merging firms sell. In many of these cases the threat is that in concentrated markets—those with only a few sellers—the merger increases the likelihood of collusion or collusion-like behavior. The result will be that the post-merger firm will reduce the volume of sales in the affected market and prices will rise.

Mergers can also injure competition in markets in which the firms purchase, however. Although that principle is widely recognized, very few litigated cases …