The Merger Incipiency Doctrine and the Importance of Redundant Competitors

The enforcers and the courts have not implemented the merger incipiency doctrine in the vigorous manner Congress intended. We believe one important reason for this failure is that, until now, the logic underlying this doctrine has never been explained. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that markets’ need for “protective redundancy” explains the incipiency policy. We are writing this article in the hope that this will cause the enforcers and courts to implement significantly more stringent merger enforcement.To vastly oversimplify, the current enforcement approach assumes that if N significant competitors are necessary for competition, N-1 competitors could well be anticompetitive, but blocking an N 1 merger would not confer any gains. Because many enforcers and judges erroneously assume that mergers among major competitors usually result in significant gains to efficiency and innovation, they believe that blocking mergers to the N 1 level would impose significant costs on the economy. Why should enforcement preserve apparent “redundancy”? First, the relationship between concentration and competition, and between concentration and innovation, is uncertain. Underestimating the minimum necessary number of firms needed for competition and for innovation is likely to result in harm to consumer welfare. Second, one or more of the N firms frequently can wither or implode as a result of normal competition, or from an unexpected shock to the market, often surprisingly quickly. This leaves only N-1 or N-2 remaining significant competitors. Finally, when enforcers challenge a merger that would have resulted in N competitors, they often allow the merger subject to complex remedies. But if the remedy fails, as they often do, the market will have too few competitors by the enforcers’ own estimate. Taken together these scenarios often leave markets with too few firms. The attenuation of the incipiency doctrine has allowed many mergers that have resulted in higher prices and lower levels of innovation. This has been shown by recent empirical work evaluating the consequences of major mergers. Moreover, other empirical work shows that significant mergers rarely produce significant efficiency gains and often result in losses to innovation.A revitalized incipiency doctrine would retain the “protective redundancy” that would preserve competition, while sacrificing little or nothing in terms of efficiency or innovation. The enforcers and the courts should implement this policy much more aggressively

The homestake surface-underground scintillations: Description

Two new detectors are currently under construction at the Homestake Gold Mine a 140-ton Large Area Scintillation Detector (LASD) with an upper surface area of 130 square meters, a geometry factor (for an isotropic flux) of 1200 square meters, sr, and a depth of 4200 m.w.e.; and a surface air shower array consisting of 100 scintillator elements, each 3 square meters, spanning an area of approximately square kilometers. Underground, half of the LASD is currently running and collecting muon data; on the surface, the first section of the air shower array will begin operation in the spring of 1985. The detectors and their capabilities are described

Monopoly Power and Market Power in Antitrust Law

This article seeks an answer to a question that should be well settled: for purposes of antitrust analysis, what is \u27market power\u27 and/or \u27monopoly power\u27? The question should be well settled because antitrust law requires proof of actual or likely market power or monopoly power to establish most types of antitrust violations. Examination of key antitrust law opinions, however, shows that courts define \u27market power\u27 and \u27monopoly power\u27 in ways that are both vague and inconsistent. We conclude that the present level of confusion is unnecessary and results from two different but related errors: (1) the belief or suspicion that market power and monopoly power are two different concepts, when they are in fact, for antitrust purposes, qualitatively identical. We argue that attempting to distinguish between market power and monopoly power creates a false dichotomy; and (2) the failure to recognize that anticompetitive economic power can manifest itself in two distinct ways, and these differences have significant legal and policy implications. The true distinction is between anticompetitive economic power that is exercised by restricting one\u27s own output, and such power exercised by restricting the output of one\u27s rivals. Identifying this fundamental distinction and discarding the false one can help to clarify a number of troublesome antitrust issues. The body of this article describes these conclusions, and the bases for them, in some detail. The appendix presents a shorter, more technical description of the principal argument. Readers already familiar with the main body of antitrust law and conversant with antitrust economics may wish to begin by reading the appendix

Monopoly Power and Market Power in Antitrust Law

This article seeks an answer to a question that should be well settled: for purposes of antitrust analysis, what is \u27market power\u27 and/or \u27monopoly power\u27? The question should be well settled because antitrust law requires proof of actual or likely market power or monopoly power to establish most types of antitrust violations. Examination of key antitrust law opinions, however, shows that courts define \u27market power\u27 and \u27monopoly power\u27 in ways that are both vague and inconsistent. We conclude that the present level of confusion is unnecessary and results from two different but related errors: (1) the belief or suspicion that market power and monopoly power are two different concepts, when they are in fact, for antitrust purposes, qualitatively identical. We argue that attempting to distinguish between market power and monopoly power creates a false dichotomy; and (2) the failure to recognize that anticompetitive economic power can manifest itself in two distinct ways, and these differences have significant legal and policy implications. The true distinction is between anticompetitive economic power that is exercised by restricting one\u27s own output, and such power exercised by restricting the output of one\u27s rivals. Identifying this fundamental distinction and discarding the false one can help to clarify a number of troublesome antitrust issues. The body of this article describes these conclusions, and the bases for them, in some detail. The appendix presents a shorter, more technical description of the principal argument. Readers already familiar with the main body of antitrust law and conversant with antitrust economics may wish to begin by reading the appendix

Monopoly Power and Market Power in Antitrust Law

This article seeks an answer to a question that should be well settled: for purposes of antitrust analysis, what is \u27market power\u27 and/or \u27monopoly power\u27? The question should be well settled because antitrust law requires proof of actual or likely market power or monopoly power to establish most types of antitrust violations. Examination of key antitrust law opinions, however, shows that courts define \u27market power\u27 and \u27monopoly power\u27 in ways that are both vague and inconsistent. We conclude that the present level of confusion is unnecessary and results from two different but related errors: (1) the belief or suspicion that market power and monopoly power are two different concepts, when they are in fact, for antitrust purposes, qualitatively identical. We argue that attempting to distinguish between market power and monopoly power creates a false dichotomy; and (2) the failure to recognize that anticompetitive economic power can manifest itself in two distinct ways, and these differences have significant legal and policy implications. The true distinction is between anticompetitive economic power that is exercised by restricting one\u27s own output, and such power exercised by restricting the output of one\u27s rivals. Identifying this fundamental distinction and discarding the false one can help to clarify a number of troublesome antitrust issues. The body of this article describes these conclusions, and the bases for them, in some detail. The appendix presents a shorter, more technical description of the principal argument. Readers already familiar with the main body of antitrust law and conversant with antitrust economics may wish to begin by reading the appendix

Individual Neurons Confined to Distinct Antennal-Lobe Tracts in the Heliothine Moth: Morphological Characteristics and Global Projection Patterns

To explore fundamental principles characterizing chemosensory information processing, we have identified antennal-lobe projection neurons in the heliothine moth, including several neuron types not previously described. Generally, odor information is conveyed from the primary olfactory center of the moth brain, the antennal lobe, to higher brain centers via projection neuron axons passing along several parallel pathways, of which the medial, mediolateral, and lateral antennal-lobe tract are considered the classical ones. Recent data have revealed the projections of the individual tracts more in detail demonstrating three main target regions in the protocerebrum; the calyces are innervated mainly by the medial tract, the superior intermediate protocerebrum by the lateral tract exclusively, and the lateral horn by all tracts. In the present study, we have identified, via iontophoretic intracellular staining combined with confocal microscopy, individual projection neurons confined to the tracts mentioned above, plus two additional ones. Further, using the visualization software AMIRA, we reconstructed the stained neurons and registered the models into a standard brain atlas, which allowed us to compare the termination areas of individual projection neurons both across and within distinct tracts. The data demonstrate a morphological diversity of the projection neurons within distinct tracts. Comparison of the output areas of the neurons confined to the three main tracts in the lateral horn showed overlapping terminal regions for the medial and mediolateral tracts; the lateral tract neurons, on the contrary, targeted mostly other output areas in the protocerebrum

Effective Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction and Fermi Liquid Theory

We present two novel relations between the quasiparticle interaction in nuclear matter and the unique low momentum nucleon-nucleon interaction in vacuum. These relations provide two independent constraints on the Fermi liquid parameters of nuclear matter. Moreover, the new constraints define two combinations of Fermi liquid parameters, which are invariant under the renormalization group flow in the particle-hole channels. Using empirical values for the spin-independent Fermi liquid parameters, we are able to compute the major spin-dependent ones by imposing the new constraints as well as the Pauli principle sum rules.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, in Proc. 11th International Conference on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, Manchester, UK, July 9-13, 200