TWENTY YEARS OF MERGER GUIDELINES ENFORCEMENT AT THE FTC: AN ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide a brief summary, from an economic perspective, of the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) experience with enforcing the Merger Guidelines over the past twenty years. We highlight some of the important economic issues that the FTC had to grapple with in implementing the Guidelines and some of the economic analyses that were brought to bear on those issues.1 We begin with a short discussion of the pre-Guidelines FTC to clarify the context within which the implementation of the Guidelines was conducted in the early years. In the remainder of the article, we summarize historical issues of economic significance by topic: important contributions to the economic analysis of mergers, market definition, concentration, barriers to entry, competitive analysis, efficiencies, and failing firm.