Provides a clear, concise and practical overview of the key economic techniques and evidence employed in European merger control.

Antitrust authorities regard the possibility of post-merger entry and merger-generated efficiencies as two factors that may counteract the negative effects of horizontal mergers. This article shows that in differentiated oligopolies with linear demand, all entry-inducing mergers harm consumer welfare. This is because if there is entry following a merger, it implies that the merger-generated efficiencies were not sufficiently large. Mergers which induce exit, owing to sufficiently high cost savings, always improve consumer welfare.

I analyze the effects of a merger between two firms in a spatially differentiatedoligopoly. I make the crucial assumption that the industry is at a free-entry equilibriumboth before and after the merger. In particular, I allow for the possibility of entry subsequent to the merger. Not surprisingly, this possibility improves the effect of the merger on consumer welfare. More importantly, I show that post-merger entry dramatically shifts the perspective on cost efficiencies as a merger defense and asset sales as a remedy. Cost efficiencies (in the form of lower marginal cost) decreasethe likelihood of entry, and thus benefit consumers less than if entry conditions wereexogenously given. Likewise, by selling assets (stores) to potential rivals, merging firms effectively buy them oreg;,quot; that is, dissuade them from opening new stores, an effect that is detrimental to consumers.

How the Chicago School Overshot the Mark is about the rise and recent fall of American antitrust. It is a collection of 15 essays, almost all expressing a deep concern that conservative economic analysis is leading judges and enforcement officials toward an approach that will ultimately harm consumer welfare. For the past 40 years or so, U.S. antitrust has been dominated intellectually by an unusually conservative style of economic analysis. Its advocates, often referred to as "The Chicago School," argue that the free market (better than any unelected band of regulators) can do a better job of achieving efficiency and encouraging innovation than intrusive regulation. The cutting edge of Chicago School doctrine originated in academia and was popularized in books by brilliant and innovative law professors like Robert Bork and Richard Posner. Oddly, a response to that kind of conservative doctrine may be put together through collections of scores of articles but until now cannot be found in any one book. This collection of essays is designed in part to remedy that situation. The chapters in this book were written by academics, former law enforcers, private sector defense lawyers, Republicans and Democrats, representatives of the left, right and center. Virtually all agree that antitrust enforcement today is better as a result of conservative analysis, but virtually all also agree that there have been examples of extreme interpretations and misinterpretations of conservative economic theory that have led American antitrust in the wrong direction. The problem is not with conservative economic analysis but with those portions of that analysis that have "overshot the mark" producing an enforcement approach that is exceptionally generous to the private sector. If the scores of practices that traditionally have been regarded as anticompetitive are ignored, or not subjected to vigorous enforcement, prices will be higher, quality of products lower, and innovation diminished. In the end consumers will pay.