Analysis Group Team Authors Paper on Gender Considerations in Antitrust Analyses
October 29, 2021
Analysis Group Managing Principal Lisa Pinheiro, Vice Presidents Anne Catherine Faye, Marissa Ginn, and Jee-Yeon Lehmann, and Associate Johanna Posch submitted a paper to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as part of the OECD’s Gender Inclusive Competition Policy project, undertaken in conjunction with the Canadian Competition Bureau. The paper, titled “Gender considerations in the analysis of market definition and competitive effects: A practical framework and illustrative example,” provides a possible framework for applying a gender lens to merger and antitrust analyses.
In their paper, the authors outline potential supply- and demand-side factors and data sources that could be used to evaluate the extent to which gender-based considerations might be relevant to analysis of competitive effects and early merger investigations. Using publicly available data collected from an online retailer, they show how their framework could be applied in practice through the analysis of a hypothetical merger between two consumer product firms. This illustrative example shows how preliminary analysis of competitive effects could identify relevant market features for competition analysis and inform whether additional investigations of gender-based factors may be warranted.