Revising the U.S. Vertical Merger Guidelines: Policy Issues and an Interim Guide for Practitioners

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 Those Guidelines are now woefully out of date.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

EXAFS Experiments on Local Structure of NO Adsorbed on Supported Silver Clusters

In-situ EXAFS experiments were performed at the Ag $K$-edge after adsorbing NO on the hydrogen reduced silver cluster. The coordination parameters, i.e. inter-atomic distance, coordination number and Debye-Waller factor were derived from a three-shell fitting model including a split Ag-Ag shell and a single Ag-O(N) shell. The multiple-shell fitting proved that the reduced silver cluster underwent a slight change in the local structure. After co-adsorbing NO and oxygen, the difference file fitting technique was used for isolating each of the first Ag-Ag(1) and Ag-O(N) shell contributions to the EXAFS spectra filtered in R-space of Fourier transform.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, scientific report and dissertation projec

Syntactic parsing of unrestricted Spanish text

This research focusses on the syntactical parsing of morphologycal tagged corpora. A proposal for a corpus oriented Spanish grammar is presented in this document. This work has been developed in the framework of the ITEM project and its main goal is to provide multilingual background for information extraction and retrieval tasks. The main goal of Tacat analyser is to provide a way of obtaining large amounts of bracketed and parsed corpora, both general land specific domain. Tacat uses context free grammars and has as input following categories of Parole specification.The incremental methodology that we use allows us to recognise different levels of complexity in the analysis and to produce compatible outputs of all the grammars.Postprint (published version

Dynamic Coordination via Organizational Routines

We investigate dynamic coordination among members of a problem solving team who receive private signals about which of their actions are required for a (static) coordinated solution and who have repeated opportunities to explore different action combinations. In this environment ordinal equilibria, in which agents condition only on how their signals rank their actions and not on signal strength, lead to simple patterns of behavior that have a natural interpretation as routines. These routine spartially solve the team’s coordination problem by synchronizing the team’s search efforts and prove to be resilient to changes in the environment by being expost equilibria, to agents having only a coarse understanding of other agents’ strategies by being fully cursed, and to natural forms of agents’ overcon?dence. The price of this resilience is that optimal routines are frequently not optimal equilibria