Hill June 6, 2018
Big is bad, in the view of many, and bigger is badder. In the context of many proposed business mergers, that stance makes far less sense than commonly assumed, and it is likely to lead to adverse effects for the very same consumers and U.S. economy that are the supposed beneficiaries of antitrust enforcement.
This pavlovian opposition to mergers almost always shunts aside the potential cost savings for consumers or other efficiencies made possible by combined operations, as well as the possibility that a combination of firms might offset the market power — a substantial ability to influence prices or other parameters — of others in some related dimension of the relevant economic sector.