Unpacking the Remedy: The Hidden Costs of Merger Remedies and the Economist’s Role in Getting Them Right

Remedies are a compromise in merger reviews. They allow transactions that might otherwise be litigated or abandoned to proceed, but they are rarely costless. For merging parties, remedies can undermine the strategic logic of a deal by requiring the sale of valuable assets or constraining future operations. For society, remedies can fail to preserve pre-merger levels of competition if the divested assets (or the buyer of those assets) are not adequate to allow the divested entity to compete effec