The 2023 Us Merger Guidelines

Table of contents I. A Retrospective and Prospective Analysis of Monopsony Power Under the Merger Guidelines Logan Billman and Kristen Limarzi II. Mergers That Increase Buyer Power and the Function of Presumptions: Two Key Issues in the Revision of the Merger Guidelines Peter C. Carstensen III. What's new in the 2023 Merger Guidelines Joseph Farrell IV. Common Ownership and the Merger Guidelines Merritt B. Fox and Menesh S. Patel V. Awakening Merger Control: The New U.S. Merger Guidelines Eleanor M. Fox VI. Antitrust Ideology and the 2023 U.S. Merger Guidelines Diana L. Moss VII. The Missing Merger Guideline: On Efficiencies Maureen K. Ohlhausen and Taylor M. Owings VIII. Economics in the 2023 Merger Guidelines: Three Areas of Concern Jeremy Sandford, Loren Smith and Nathan Wilson IX. The Evolution (and Devolution) of Market Structure Reasoning Sean P. Sullivan X. Market Delineation under the New Merger Guidelines: Gerrymandering Redux Gregory J. Werden

Mergers and acquisitions are a major component of antitrust law and practice. The U.S. antitrust agencies spend a majority of their time on merger enforcement. The focus of most merger review at the agencies involves horizontal mergers, that is, mergers among firms that compete at the same level of production or distribution.Vertical mergers combine firms at different levels of production or distribution. In the simplest case, a vertical merger joins together a firm that produces an input (and competes in an input market) with a firm that uses that input to produce output (and competes in an output market).Over the years, the agencies have issued Merger Guidelines that outline the type of analysis carried out by the agencies and the agencies' enforcement intentions in light of state of the law. These Guidelines are used by agency staff in evaluating mergers, as well as by outside counsel and the courts.Guidelines for vertical mergers were issued in 1968 and revised in 1984. However, the Vertical Merger Guidelines have not been revised since 1984. Those Guidelines are now woefully out of date. They do not reflect current economic thinking about vertical mergers. Nor do they reflect current agency practice. Nor do they reflect the analytic approach taken in the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines. As a result, practitioners and firms lack the benefits of up-to-date guidance from the U.S. enforcement agencies.

These Guidelines outline the principal analytical techniques, practices, and the enforcement policy of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (the "Agencies") with respect to mergers and acquisitions involving actual or potential competitors ("horizontal mergers") under the federal antitrust laws. The relevant statutory provisions include Section 7 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. § 18, Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1, 2, and Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, 15 U.S.C. § 45. Most particularly, Section 7 of the Clayton Act prohibits mergers if "in any line of commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly." The Agencies seek to identify and challenge competitively harmful mergers while avoiding unnecessary interference with mergers that are either competitively beneficial or neutral. Most merger analysis is necessarily predictive, requiring an assessment of what will likely happen if a merger proceeds as compared to what will likely happen if it does not. Given this inherent need for prediction, these Guidelines reflect the congressional intent that merger enforcement should interdict competitive problems in their incipiency and that certainty about anticompetitive effect is seldom possible and not required for a merger to be illegal.

On July 18, 2023, the Agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust law relating to mergers--the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission--published draft Merger Guidelines (dMGs) for comment. This comment reflects cumulative experience from four decades as an enforcer, from researching and writing approximately 90 articles and book chapters relating to the competitive effects of mergers and their assessment, and from involvement in the preparation of all prior Merger Guidelines issued by the Agencies over the past half-century. Unlike prior Merger Guidelines, the dMGs do not promote the rule of law by articulating self-imposed limits to the exercise of discretion. As compared with prior Guidelines, the dMGs say less about which mergers the Agencies intend to challenge and especially about which mergers they intend not to challenge. The dMGs are more of a legal brief arguing that the Agencies have enormous discretion and that merging firms have an insuperable burden with any defense put forward.The dMGs assert case law support for the policies articulated, but many of the cases do not support the policies for which they are cited, and many of the policies lack any support in law. As a general matter, the law is less receptive than the dMGs suggest to arguments that mergers substantially lessen competition, and more receptive to rebuttal arguments.