Estimating Differential Dynamic Merger Effects on Market Structure and Entry in Related Markets

The U.S. and EU merger guidelines emphasize “ease of entry” arguments but little is known about the dynamic impact of realized mergers on market structure. This study provides insights on this topic with the use of detailed firm-level data on the memory chip market. Our estimation results provide evidence for differential merger effects on market structure. These effects depend on whether the mergers are dominated by market-power or efficiency gains. While efficiency-dominated mergers cause exit, market-power-dominated mergers attract entrants, and these effects are increasing over time. We also find that market-power mergers have a larger effect on entry than efficiency mergers have on exit. Our results show that mergers can reduce the number of potential entrants into related product markets and serve as an instrument to “reduce the likelihood of entry”.

     

U.S. merger policy and the 1992 Merger Guidelines

This article reviews the empirical evidence regarding the effects of mergers on corporate efficiency. In light of this evidence it then evaluates the effectiveness of U.S. merger policy as articulated in the 1992 Guidelines of the Department of Justice. It argues that the 1992 Guidelines and the U.S. Government's policies toward business more generally over the past 12 years have been characterized by a bias for bigness. It concludes that this bias will only be eliminated when government authorities in charge of merger policy recognize that many mergers lower economic efficiency and design and enforce their policies accordingly.     

ENTRY DETERRENCE BY NON‐HORIZONTAL MERGER*

We study when and how pure non‐horizontal mergers, whether cross‐product or vertical, can deter new entry. Organizational mergers implicitly commit firms to more aggressive price competition. Because heightened competition deters entry, mergers can occur in equilibrium even when, absent entry considerations, they do not. We show that, in order to prevent a flood of entrants, mergers arise even when a marginal merger costs incumbent firms more than does a marginal entrant.     

Merger Control Policy Under China’s Anti-Monopoly Law

China??s merger policy and enforcement approaches since its Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) took effect in August 2008 are by and large based on the same conceptual framework that is employed in advanced economies. While China has shown a very fast learning capability in conducting competition analysis, further capacity building in China is crucial. There is no clear evidence of industrial policy considerations being at the forefront in the eight published decisions by the Ministry of Commerce to date, except for its very early decisions. We propose a competition-neutral principle, which requires that a competition test be conducted before, and independently from, any consideration of industrial policy and argue that industrial policy matters only for competition-neutral mergers. On a more technical level, if China adopts the total welfare standard, then its treatment of efficiencies and the meaning of sufficiency of entry post merger should be modified accordingly from the US/EU consumer-oriented model.     

Hold-up of anti-competitive mergers

We construct a model of endogenous mergers and study some issues of whether and how to control mergers, taking into account firms equilibrium response to policy. Anti-competitive mergers benefit competitors more than the merging firms. We show how such free-riding reduces firms incentives to merge (holdup). Firms delay merger proposals, hoping other firms will merge instead. The final result, however, is an overly concentrated market. Merger control may thus preserve competitive markets. In the presence of holdup, even reasonable policies such as requiring divestiture or using cost-benefit analysis, may be worse than not controlling mergers at all.     

Vertical mergers in procurement markets

This paper uses computational methods that reveal ambiguous strategic effects of vertical mergers in a duopoly setting featuring incomplete information about sellers' costs, and differences in sellers' productive capabilities. First, vertical mergers can be jointly unprofitable. Second, the buyer's preferred merger partner is almost always the seller with lower expected costs, and is typically the larger seller. Third, vertical mergers always reduce the unintegrated seller's profits, sometimes dramatically. Finally, vertical mergers can increase total welfare. Some of the results contrast qualitatively with unambiguous findings from models with symmetric sellers, which suggests that caution should be used in drawing general inferences from those models.     

Innovation and Merger Decisions in the Pharmaceutical Industry

There is increasing public policy concern about the potentialeffects of mergers on innovation. This paper provides acomparative analysis of approaches to innovational competitiontaken by the E.U. and U.S. merger authorities in a sample of threerecent, major, pharmaceutical mergers. The European Commission'sapproach appears lighter handed and places more explicit emphasison effects in downstream markets. The uncertainties in the analysisof dynamic effects of mergers on innovation, even in pharmaceuticals,suggest the need for a cautious approach and for careful framingof any merger remedies where R & D projects and components, ratherthan approved drugs, are involved.     

企业横向兼并理论及模型研究综述

首先分析了企业横向兼并战略产生的背景,然后分别从外生兼并行为、内生兼并行为和动态兼并行为角度系统地介绍同质产品市场企业兼并动机与效应、异质产品市场企业兼并动机与效应以及网络外部性产品市场企业兼并动机与效应等各种理论研究模型,并评述了各种理论研究模型的结果与存在的局限性。     

Are there waves in merger activity after all?

This paper investigates the merger wave hypothesis for the US and the UK employing a Markov regime-switching model. Using quarterly data covering the last 30 years, for the US, we identify the beginning of a merger wave in the mid 1990s but not the much-discussed 1980s merger wave. We argue that the latter finding can be ascribed to the refined methods of inference offered by the Gibbs sampling approach. As opposed to the US, mergers in the UK exhibit multiple waves, with activity surging in the early 1970s and the late 1980s.     

Harm to Competition Under the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines

In August, 2010, the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission issued new Guidelines for assessing horizontal mergers under the antitrust laws. These Guidelines were long awaited not merely because of the lengthy interval between them and previous Guidelines but also because enforcement policy had drifted far from the standards articulated in the previous Guidelines. The 2010 Guidelines are distinctive manly for two things. One is briefer and less detailed treatment of market delineation. The other is an expanded set of theories of harm that justify preventing mergers or reversing mergers that have already occurred. The 2010 Guidelines reflect a growing belief that in markets where product differentiation is minimal competition tends to be robust and the structural presumptions stated in previous Guidelines were too harsh. By contrast, where product differentiation is substantial the Guidelines?? approach tended to define markets too broadly, overlooking significantly anticompetitive possibilities. Under the 2010 Guidelines unilateral effects analysis relevant markets can be very small, often limited to three or four firms, and excluding some obvious substitutes. Markets in merger analysis are not defined for their own sake, however, but rather to ascertain whether a particular alteration in market structure covered by the merger provisions will be likely to facilitate a price increase. The 2010 Guidelines address four substantive merger concerns: exclusion, restraints on innovation, unilateral effects, and coordinated effects. The Guidelines have a separate section on mergers limiting ??innovation and product variety,?? treated mainly in the category of unilateral effects. The 2010 Guidelines are more flexible than previous Guidelines and also more catholic about the types of harms that mergers might cause and the techniques that can be used to assess them. Older Guidelines were excessively wed to methodologies that were at the forefront of applied merger analysis when they were drafted, but that tended to make the Guidelines obsolete as new methodologies became available. Not only do methodologies change, they are also specific to the situation. Further, they tend to be well developed in the literature and accessible to experts consulted by those defending a merger as well as to the government economists who employ them. To be sure, there is a tradeoff between flexibility and guidance. Often we can have more of one only by giving up some of the other, and that tradeoff is clearly present in the 2010 Guidelines.     

The effects of mergers in markets for differentiated products

Several authors have studied conditions in which price-increasing forces associated with mergers in ahomogenous oligopoly might be offset by price-decreasing forces associated with rationalization of production. Analogously, in the case of mergers between producers ofdifferentiated products, economies of scope are a possible price-decreasing force. The interrelationship of demands can be another one. Edgeworth showed the possible strength of this latter force in demonstrating that the imposition of taxes on substitute products can cause the prices of all of them to fall. That paradoxical result is directly relevant since effects of mergers are shown to be equivalent to those of properly chosen taxes. Nevertheless, it is shown that the Edgeworth phenomenon does not carry over to mergers i.e., demand forces on their own are not sufficient for mergers to lead to reductions in all prices — although some price reductions are possible. The paper also develops conditions for all prices to rise after a merger. General conjectural variation models in both price and quantity are considered. Finally, it is shown that mergers cannot increase welfare in linear models with Bertrand or Cournot competition. The implications of the results for merger policy are briefly discussed.     

Economics at the Antitrust Division: 2017–2018

This article describes some of the work of Antitrust Division economists over the past year, with a focus on modeling. It begins by illustrating the mapping from evidence to prediction using tools for assessing the effects of mergers using Bertrand, Cournot, and auction models. It then turns to two hot topics in competition policy: the implications of claims of increasing margins for merger enforcement and the validity of claims of increasing concentration. Finally, it considers how mergers affect prices in bargaining models.     

An equilibrium approach to international merger policy

I treat international merger policy as a repeated veto game. I show that there exists a unique efficient equilibrium within a particular class of trigger strategy equilibria. I then consider a series of comparative statics and extensions: (a) if for some exogenous reason one of the countries becomes more lenient towards mergers, than the other country becomes more lenient as well; (b) merger remedies increase the probability that a merger is approved and increase total welfare; (c) the effects of a merger wave are magnified by the equilibrium approval policy.     

EFFICIENCY GAINS AND STRUCTURAL REMEDIES IN MERGER CONTROL*

This paper studies the role of structural remedies in merger control in a Cournot setting where (endogenous) mergers are motivated by prospective efficiency gains and must be submitted to an Antitrust Authority (AA) which might require partial divestiture for approval. From a merger policy perspective, this paper's main contribution is two‐fold. First, it shows that if mergers do not involve all firms in the industry, then merger remedies help the AA to increase consumer surplus only if assets are divested to competitors already in the market. Second, it presents a model which clarifies that there can only exist social costs to ‘over‐fixing’ the anticompetitive effects of a merger if merger review policy treats mergers as one‐time events. When a more dynamic view is taken of sequential merger review, then there can never be an ‘over‐fixing’ problem. In this case, however, remedies are shown to be needed to make myopic merger review optimal.     

The Entry-Inducing Effects of Horizontal Mergers: An Exploratory Analysis

Antitrust law presumes that entry normally prevents or reverses anticompetitive effects from horizontal mergers. But when sunk costs associated with entry are at levels suggested by prevailing market structure, the opportunity for entry created by an anticompetitive merger plausibly is too small to induce entry, even absent Stiglerian ‘barriers to entry.’ This is illustrated for Cournot and Bertrand models. Significant entry also makes otherwise profitable Bertrand mergers unprofitable, assuming no efficiency gains. Consequently, the entry issue can be collapsed into the efficiency issue: if a presumably profitable merger does not generate significant efficiencies, it cannot be expected to induce entry.     

A New Perspective on Entry in Horizontal Merger Analysis

I analyze horizontal mergers in procurement settings in which sellers incur costs to participate. Considering existing sellers’ contest-level entry differs from antitrust authorities’ typical emphasis on new sellers’ market-level entry to counteract a merger’s anticompetitive harm. I show that profitable mergers can increase consumer and total surplus by inducing more and stronger contest-level entry by the merged seller, which echoes common claims from merging parties that their merger is beneficial because it creates a stronger competitor. This finding suggests caution by antitrust authorities: when contest-level entry costs matter, standard models that ignore those costs prescribe blocking procompetitive mergers.

     

Who's acquiring whom? — Experimental evidence of firm size effect on B2B mergers and marketing/sales tasks

A recent study has revealed a marked growth in global mergers and acquisitions between firms from developed and developing countries. Unlike previous merger waves, however, companies in emerging markets are playing an increasingly important role. This highlights the need for greater scrutiny of more, and diverse, aspects of mergers. In particular, the size difference between firms involved in mergers and its impact on merger outcomes are of interest. This paper examines whether the involvement of differing numbers of employees (either from the acquiring firm or from the acquired firm) may influence merger success. Drawing on previous work in understanding organizational culture and merger dynamics, we conduct a laboratory experiment that not only confirms the presence of learning and conflict in organizational cultures in mergers but also presents new findings in relation to the relative size of the firms involved.     

The determinants of merger waves: An international perspective

One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves that are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We use a natural way to discriminate between pure stock market influences on firm decisions and other influences by examining merger patterns for both listed and unlisted firms. If “real” changes in the economy drive merger waves, as some neoclassical theories of mergers predict, both listed and unlisted firms should experience waves. We find significant differences between listed and unlisted firms as predicted by behavioral theories of merger waves.     

Conglomerate mergers and subsequent industry effects

The focus of most studies of conglomerate mergers has been on the effects on companies involved. Of more direct relevance to antitrust policy is the question of industry effects of this type of merger. This article looks at eleven cases of “large firm/leading firm” conglomerate mergers completed between 1958 and 1970 and examines census data to see if structure or performance of the acquired “leading firm's” market was altered due to the merger. The results suggest that industry structure is not significantly affected, but that there may be adverse performance effects when the acquired firm is a leader in an unconcentrated market with substantial entry barriers.     

Trade Union Mergers in British and Australian Television Broadcasting

A complex set of forces facing trade union organizations has meant that union restructuring vis-à-vis merger activity has been a prominent feature of many Western labour movements in the 1980s and 1990s. This paper is located in these structural developments, and its main contribution lies in the insights provided by an in-depth examination of recent union merger activity in commercial television in the UK and Australia. In contrast to the work of Undy et al . (1981), the results suggest that union mergers are influenced by more than changes in membership patterns, and that the delineation of merger categories may be far more complex than what has previously been identified by their model. It is argued, too, that the nature of the forces and the processes that led to the broadcasting union mergers in the UK and Australia were significantly influenced by the different institutional contexts of both countries. Finally, and related to this, it would appear that union merger outcomes (at least in the short term) are linked to the preceding processes by which merger is brought about. One policy implication of this is that anything other than a case-by-case evaluation of union mergers may be misleading.