The US Merger Guidelines - A Review

As part of the broader competition mandate under the current admin- istration, the DOJ and FTC issued a draft of revised merger guidelines in mid-July 2023.3 After collecting comments and holding public work- shops, the Agencies turned a final version of the guidelines six months later, which will replace the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines.4 The changes to the draft guidelines, which presumably. [...] The final guidelines responded to a number of such concerns, especially as they relate to the transparency of the guidelines for the business community, practitioners, and the public; and their administrability in federal courts.6 At the same time, material in the final guidelines that was the subject of center-left commentary, but remained unaltered from the draft, could potentially work against. [...] DOJ’s success in forcing the aban- donment of the 4–3 merger of wireless facilities-based carriers AT&T and T-Mobile in 2011 illustrates the importance of enforcement against highly concentrative mergers.29 The FTC’s successful block of the merger of broadline food distributors Sysco and U. [...] In 2015, for example, the DOJ also prevailed in blocking the merger of commercial health insurers Anthem and Cigna, setting pro-enforcement precedent on the treatment of merger efficiencies.32 The final version of the guidelines makes a number of changes that responds to the foregoing concerns, moving them further to the center. [...] From the intricacies of common ownership to the complexities of market delineation, from the implications of monopsony power to the considerations surrounding buyer power, or the role and relevance of economics in antitrust analysis, each chapter investigates critical aspects of the evolving regulatory framework.