Antitrust.

• Author: Van Doren, Peter

* "Doomsday Mergers: A Retrospective Study of False Alarms," by Brian C. Albrecht, Dirk Auer, Eric Fruits, and Geoffrey A. Manne. SSRN Working Paper no. 4407779, April 2023.

* "'Killer Acquisitions' Reexamined: Economic Hyperbole in the Age of Populist Antitrust," by Jonathan M. Barnett. SSRN Working Paper no. 4408546, May 2023.

Populist antitrust is back. Lina Khan chairs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Jonathan Kanter heads the U.S. Justice Department's Antitrust Division, and Tim Wu was special assistant to President Joe Biden for technology and competition policy. But the intellectual attack on populist antitrust is also back. So, which view better fits the facts?

The first of these papers, by Brian C. Albrecht et al., revisits mergers from the recent past that were criticized by populist opponents but were allowed to go forward. They found:

* At the time of the Amazon-Whole Foods merger, Kahn criticized it as allowing "Amazon to leverage and amplify the extraordinary power it enjoys in online markets and delivery, making an even greater share of commerce part of its fief." But Whole Foods' market share hasn't changed and consumers have enjoyed more convenience and lower prices.

* Over the last two decades, the beer industry has had many mergers that populists predicted would increase the price of beer and decimate craft beer producers. But prices did not increase on average and the craft-beer segment has continued to thrive.

* Critics argued that Bayer's acquisition of Monsanto would increase the price of corn, soy, and cotton seeds. Seed prices have remained constant.

* When Google acquired Fitbit, opponents claimed the merger would augment Google's advertising dominance, harm user privacy through the selling of their health data, and reduce competition in wearable devices. The evidence suggests the opposite has occurred: Google's share of online-advertising has declined, Fitbit's market share of wearable-devices has declined, and Google does not use data from Fitbit in its advertising platform.

Concludes Albrecht et al., "Popular and populist fears about corporate consolidation are often completely untethered from economic reality and wildly erroneous. The less these fears influence antitrust policy, the better."

The second paper, by Jonathan M. Barnett, examines...