SHOULD ANTITRUST CONSENT DECREES REGULATE POST-MERGER PRICING?

Should Merger Policy Be Changed? An Antitrust Perspective

Over the past 15 years, a revolution has occurred in U.S. merger policy. ~ Antitrust attacks on non-horizontal mergers have all but disappeared. Regulation of horizontal mergers now starts from the presumption that "the vast majority of horizontal mergers pose no market power problems and should simply be approved rapidly" (Schmalensee 1987, p. 44). In February 1986, the Reagan adminisration ur...

Post-Merger Product Repositioning

We study mergers among firms that compete by simultaneously choosing price and location. The merged firm moves its two products away from each other to reduce cannibalization, and the nonmerging firms move their products in between the merging firm’s products. Post-merger repositioning increases product variety, which benefits consumers, but repositioning also affects post-merger prices in two ...

Post-merger integration

This article discusses post-merger integration (PMI) and the trade-off between the economic benefits and costs that arise when organizations merge under a new organizational structure and reconfigure their businesses and resources. To reconfiguration scholars, PMI is a crucial tool for firms to reconfigure resources, product lines, and business units to adjust to internal and external environme...

Post-merger Integration (pmi)

Coordinated Interaction: Pre-merger Constraints and Post-merger Effects

Concern about coordinated effects long has been central to U.S. merger policy. The first sets of Horizontal Merger Guidelines (“Guidelines”), issued by the Department of Justice in 1982 and 1984, focused their attention squarely on coordinated effects.1 The language of the 1984 Guidelines articulated the “unifying theme . . . that mergers should not be permitted to create or enhance ‘market pow...