NERA Managing Director James Mellsop will chair the "Vertical mergers: malignant or just misunderstood?" panel discussion at the Competition Matters conference taking place in Auckland.

In recent years the Commerce Commission has investigated a number of vertical mergers, including Sky/Vodafone, Trade Me/MotorCentral and Ingenico/Paymark. Vertical mergers have also been in the news internationally, most notably AT & T/Time Warner in the US.

Mr. Mellsop will chair an expert panel that will discuss some of the matters raised in these investigations, particularly in light of recently published academic literature that suggests that vertical mergers may be more likely to generate anti-competitive harms than has generally considered to be the case.