Contributions to Antitrust Economics

From the existing market dynamics and firms' restructuring activities, perhaps mergers and acquisitions have historically captured the greatest amount of attention and has provoked the strongest sentiments for both sides of the issue. Microeconomic Theory has long supported the general assumption that market concentration yields a higher market power within the industry and thus tends to reduce consumer welfare. On the other hand, concentration itself may occur in furtherance of efficiency and increase society's welfare. The establishment of antitrust regulation, aiming to safe guard competitive incentives within an industry without jeopardizing market dynamics, soon identifies the need of developing quantitative tools to assess the degree to which competition is being harmed by mergers and/or collusion, so that verdicts can be reached. This dissertation focuses on antitrust analysis for horizontal mergers and on the role of cross-business ownership on output prices. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to antitrust analysis. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on the role of cost efficiencies in antitrust analysis when using Upward Pricing Pressure as a merger screening tool. Chapter 5 focuses on the effect of common ownership across different business units on output prices by studying the case of hospitals. In chapter 2, I provide a survey of efficiencies in antitrust economics. Efficiency claims in antitrust cases as a pro-competitive defense has a long dichotomous history fluctuating between theoretical acceptance and practitioner's skepticism. In chapter3 I investigate the accuracy of post-merger price prediction and merger screening accuracy of Upward Pricing Pressure (UPP) under different formulations in the presence of merger efficiencies; chapter 4I test the robustness of these results under different curvatures of the cost structure, as well as tests the robustness of first order approximation in chapter 3 under different specifications of pass-through; chapter 5 reconciles two important issues in the literature: Common Ownership and Concentration effects in hospital industry, and explores the impact of common ownership within the health care industry by focusing on US hospital's ownership variations. Although the analyses of the economic models mentioned in this dissertation are done under American Antitrust Law, the implications of this research has broader impacts, as much of Competition Law throughout the world tends to follow similar principles and adhere many of the practices that have worked from each other.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Kansas

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Santos Dutra, Jessica Regina

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sabarwal, Tarun

• Economics
• Law
• Antitrust
• Common Ownership
• Hospitals
• Mergers
• Upward Pricing Pressure

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright held by the author.

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

http://dissertations.umi.com/ku:16607

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/37200