Brian Albrecht on New Draft Merger Guidelines

The Dispatch – ICLE Chief Economist Brian Albrecht was cited by The Dispatch in a story about the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Justice Department’s new draft merger guidelines. You can read full piece here.

Earlier this year, for example, Albrecht and his colleagues at the International Center for Law and Economics wrote a terrific report documenting some of the biggest “doomsday mergers” that fizzled out – or, like beer industry consolidation, actually improved the market’s competitiveness and consumer surplus – in retrospect. This includes Amazon/Whole Foods, Bayer/Monsanto, Google/Fitbit, Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, and Ticketmaster/Live Nation. In each case, antitrust hawks wrongly predicted competitive destruction (e.g., Amazon/Whole Foods) or ignored the merger at the time it occurred and only claimed it was an obvious problem years later (e.g., Facebook/Instagram).