Approval Rules for Sequential Horizontal Mergers

• Autor(a) principal: Barros, Pedro Pita
• Data de Publicação: 1996
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/88068

Merger approval decisions lie at the heart of competition policies. Farrell and Shapiro (1990) presented a model stating safe harbor rules for merger approval. However, in the presence of sequential mergers, computation of the sufficient external effect criterion for each merger may not be possible as for the second merger it will depend on the equilibrium emerging after the first merger. If the mergers are close enough in time, the second merger must be evaluated without the knowledge of the equilibrium point after the first merger. Two alternatives are proposed: joint merger evaluation and independent merger evaluation. The decision errors (too much approval or rejection) are identified for each of the alternative rules. It is shown that joint merger evaluations generate too much rejections and independent evaluations originate too much approval of mergers.