Economic Analysis in Merger Control
Brussels, Belgium
24 June 2008
Hosted By: the Chief Economist Team, DG Competition, European Commission
On 24 June 2008, a team from NERA led by Director Dr. Mark Williams held a workshop with the Chief Economist Team at DG Competition of the European Commission in Brussels. The theme of the workshop was to discuss how economic modeling can inform the assessment of relevant counterfactual scenarios in merger analysis, with a view to predicting the unilateral effects arising as a direct consequence of a horizontal merger.
Based around an actual published merger decision of a national member state, NERA presented a case study that illustrated the potential tensions between the predictions of industrial organization economics on the one hand and empirical methods such as econometric studies and survey evidence on the other. The seminar focused on discussions of evidential problems arising when the empirical evidence cannot plausibly be explained by conventional economic reasoning, and showed that, despite the importance of relying on "facts over theory," the required inferences from the evidence could not be made without some form of conceptual framework.
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