Studien dokumentieren weltweit steigende Marktkonzentration, Gewinne und Preisaufschläge in vielen Wirtschaftssektoren seit den 1980er Jahren. Doch die Datenanalyse nach Wirtschaftszweigen entspricht nicht den ökonomisch relevanten Märkten im Sinne des Wettbewerbsrechts. Berechnungen auf Basis eines neuartigen Datensatzes über relevante Märkte zeigen hingegen, dass die Marktkonzentration in Deutschland ...
Nicht erst seit der Corona Pandemie gibt es weltweit den Trend zum bargeldlosen Zahlungsverkehr. Zudem beflügelt die Vorstellung eines zielgenauen Behavioral (Big Data) Scoring die Fantasien von Investoren in der Datentechnologiebranche. Es scheint ökonomisch verführerisch, beide Trends zusammenführen, wenn man alle Daten aus dem Zahlungsverkehr für ein persönliches Profil auswerten würde. Dieses Geschäftsmodell ...
Since 2010, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) have acquired more than 400 companies. Competition authorities did not scrutinize most of these transactions and blocked none. This raised concerns that GAFAM acquisitions target potential competitors yet fly under the radar of current merger control due to the features of the digital economy. We empirically study the competitive effects ...
Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for 1,014 mergers affecting 12,325 antitrust markets scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and ...
We empirically investigate the relevance of multi-homing in two-sided markets. First, we build a micro-founded structural econometric model that encompasses demand for differentiated products and allows for multi-homing on both sides of the market. We then use an original dataset on the Italian daily newspaper market that includes information on double-homing by readers to estimate readers’ and advertisers’ ...
An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level while firm level revenues are a poor indicator of product sales. We use a novel database that identifies over ...
I study the predictability of the EC’s merger decision procedure before and after the 2004 merger policy reform based on a dataset covering all affected markets of mergers with an official decision documented by DG Comp between 1990 and 2014. Using the highly flexible, non-parametric random forest algorithm to predict DG Comp’s assessment of competitive concerns in markets affected by a merger, I find ...
We study the evolution of the EC’s merger decision procedure over the first 25 years of European competition policy. Using a novel dataset constructed at the level of the relevant markets and containing all merger cases over the 1990-2014 period, we evaluate how consistently arguments related to structural market parameters were applied over time. Using non-parametric machine learning techniques, we ...