Non-Price Effects of Mergers Scrutinized by Analysis Group Consultants
February 1, 2024
In recent years, regulators and other interested parties have advocated for increased attention to non-price effects of mergers, particularly when data is a key input but not the main product of the merging parties. In these mergers, economic analysis has sometimes shown that the resulting combined datasets may have an adverse impact on competition or consumer welfare. In “Is Data ‘The New Oil’? Non-Price Effects of Mergers in Data-Intensive Industries,” an article published in CPI Antitrust Chronicle, three Analysis Group consultants analyze these non-price effects and their potential consequences for competition.
In the article, Managing Principals Emily Cotton and Rebecca Kirk Fair and Vice President Philipp Tillmann examine three topics that antitrust authorities and industry observers have raised as particularly concerning with respect to anticompetitive effects: potential entrenchment, data privacy, and potential foreclosure from data inputs. The authors discuss both the potential effects of these topics and remind readers that investigations into their impacts should consider not only anticompetitive aspects but the potential gains in quality, data security and privacy, and production efficiencies from such mergers.