The High Costs of Not Prohibiting Anticompetitive Megamergers

The High Costs of Not Prohibiting Anticompetitive Megamergers

Description

Megamergers can have large payoffs—especially to the executives and financial intermediaries. They can also entail large harms to competition and huge inefficiencies. When planned megamergers have significant anticompetitive aspects, they are nearly always approved with spin-offs and other conditions. This chapter argues that anticompetitive megamergers present a seriously overlooked enforcement problem at the point of remedies. Incentives facing enforcers to clear the merger with agreed remedies to protect their country are not aligned with an optimal solution to protect the world from the global anticompetitive effects. Moreover, anticompetitive megamergers tend to impose disparate costs on developing countries, which are often the loci of greatest harms and least power to prevent them. This article demonstrates in detail the misalignment of incentives through the window of the Bayer/Monsanto merger. It proposes solutions that would nudge national authorities to consider global mergers’ harms and benefits holistically and to recognize when a simple prohibition is in the interests of their own jurisdiction as well as the interests of the world.

First Page

101

Source Publication

Harry First: A Global Vision for Competition Law - Liber Amicorum

Source Editors/Authors

Darren Bush, Andrew I. Gavil, Spencer Weber Waller

Publication Date

4-23-2025

Publisher

Concurrences

The High Costs of Not Prohibiting Anticompetitive Megamergers

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