Download or read book Evaluating the Evidence on Vertical Mergers written by Marissa Beck and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission issued draft Vertical Merger Guidelines on January 10, 2020. In the discussion on vertical merger policy, some commenters have relied on surveys of the empirical economic literature to justify a procompetitive presumption. This comment reviews two frequently cited surveys of empirical evidence on vertical integration as of 2005-2007, as well as more recent studies not included in those surveys, to determine the extent to which they find that the vertical integration they study was procompetitive or anticompetitive. Upon careful inspection, the evidence they provide on the change in welfare due to vertical mergers is decidedly mixed. Perhaps more importantly, taken as a whole, these studies do not provide evidence for the proposition that all or most vertical mergers are good for consumers.