Antitrust Chronicle®

Dear Readers, Exclusive dealing is among the oldest concerns of antitrust, and among the least settled. A dominant supplier rarely needs an express exclusivity clause: loyalty rebates, market-share discounts, volume...

Dominant suppliers do not often ask customers to sign an explicit exclusivity clause. They can achieve much the same result through prices, loyalty rebates, market-share discounts, all-unit discounts, or minimum...

Competition for an exclusive position between equally matched suppliers is usually thought to help consumers: when suppliers are close substitutes, sole sourcing turns ordinary rivalry into a winner-take-all auction that...

Share-based requirements—agreements or rebate programs that condition favorable terms on a buyer purchasing a specified share, but less than all, of its requirements from a dominant seller—occupy an uneasy middle...

Dear Readers,   The European Commission’s Draft Merger Guidelines, published on 30 April 2026, are the most significant rewrite of EU merger control since the 2004 Merger Regulation. They fold...

In this article, the authors open with a CEO pitching an acquisition to financiers on the strength of synergies nobody has documented. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of reviewing...

The assessment of efficiencies has been among the most contested topics in the review of the European Commission’s Merger Guidelines. Under the existing framework, efficiency claims have proved exceptionally difficult...

The EC’s new guidelines bring a greater emphasis on dynamic theories of harm along with a greater openness to efficiencies. This implies a greater volume of cases will involve trading...

This article examines the emergence of exploitative portfolio effects as a standalone theory of harm in EU merger control.  Unlike the traditional exclusionary conglomerate framework — which targets foreclosure of...

The European Commission's 2026 Draft Merger Guidelines ("DMG") are the most significant overhaul of EU merger control in over two decades. They combine the consolidation of more than twenty years of...

Two civil society organizations assess the European Commission’s draft Merger Guidelines. Merger control exists to keep market power in check. The Commission's draft Guidelines equip it to do that, then...

This article argues that the draft Guidelines’ “Innovation Spaces” and “general innovation competition” remain in substance the protection of competition in markets for products not yet in existence. Applying the...