Mergers with Differentiated Products: Where Do We Stand?

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the 2010 U.S. Horizontal Merger Guidelines, this article provides an overview of the state of economic analysis of unilateral effects in mergers with differentiated products. Drawing on our experience with merger enforcement in Europe, we discuss both static and dynamic competition, with a special emphasis on the calibration of competitive effects. We also discuss the role of market shares and structural presumptions in differentiated product markets.

Recent Developments at DG Competition: 2019/2020.

The Directorate General for Competition at the European Commission enforces competition law in the areas of antitrust, merger control, and State aid. After providing a general presentation of the role of the Chief Competition Economist's team, this article surveys some of the main developments at the Directorate General for Competition over 2019/2020. In particular, the article reviews the economic analysis in the Qualcomm predation case, recent developments in the assessment of vertical mergers, as well as the new "Temporary Framework" that has been developed in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

Parallel imports, price controls, and innovation.

The impact of parallel trade on innovation in R&D-intensive industries, such as pharmaceuticals, is a hotly debated question in antitrust and IP policy. The well-known argument that parallel trade dampens innovation by undermining firms' ability to price discriminate has been challenged by recent literature. The argument is that with endogenous price controls, parallel trade increases innovation by reducing governments' incentives to set particularly low price caps. In this paper, we show that this result crucially depends on the degree of homogeneity of the trading countries. The result only holds if consumers in poorer countries have a relatively similar demand for medication as consumers in richer countries. Instead, when countries are relatively heterogeneous, parallel trade dampens innovation and lowers welfare by exporting price cap regulation from poorer to richer countries. These findings are in line with recent case evidence. We also show that when patent length is endogenous, richer countries will tend to choose longer patent protection with parallel trade, whereas equilibrium price caps tend to be tighter in that case.

Recent Developments at DG Competition: 2017/2018.

The Directorate General for Competition at the European Commission enforces competition law in the areas of antitrust, merger control, and state aids. This year's article provides first a general presentation of the role of the Chief Competition Economist's team and surveys some of the main achievements of the Directorate General for Competition over 2017/2018. The article then reviews: the Google Search (Shopping) case, the role of price discrimination in state aid cases; and the use of counterfactuals in merger cases where alternative transactions might have occurred absent the merger.