Merger guidelines
 |
| Competition law |
|---|
| Basic concepts |
| Anti-competitive practices |
| Enforcement authorities and organizations |
The Merger guidelines are a set of internal rules promulgated by the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) in conjunction with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). These rules, which have been revised a number of times in the past four decades, govern the extent to which these two regulatory bodies will scrutinize and/or challenge a potential merger on grounds of market concentration or threat to competition within a relevant market.
The merger guidelines have sections governing both horizontal integration and vertical integration.
The first merger guidelines set forth by the DOJ were the 1968 Merger Guidelines, which remained largely unchanged until 1982. The 1968 guidelines were developed by former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Dr. Donald Turner, an economist and lawyer with expertise in the field of industrial organization. These merger guidelines were criticized in some quarters as being overly concerned with issues of market structure such as barriers to entry and concentration ratios at the expense of efficiency and economies of scale. They were, however, a step forward in two ways: they gave more accurate advice to corporate management as to when and how mergers would be examined, and brought new economic ideas into antitrust enforcement, specifically the "structure-conduct-performance" model of industrial organization.
...
Wikipedia