The 2015 Steris/Synergy merger was the first litigated U.S. merger challenge in more than 30 years to turn on potential competition. The Federal Trade Commission alleged that Synergy's planned U.S. x-ray sterilization facilities would have competed with Steris's gamma sterilization business, although the merging parties argued that Synergy's plans were too tentative and financially weak to support entry. The district court sided with the parties after concluding that Synergy's entry was insufficiently likely. This article develops two themes. First, it reassesses the merger in light of both the contemporaneous record and nearly a decade of subsequent events. Although not dispositive, this retrospective evidence suggests Synergy's planned entry was commercially credible and competitively significant: Steris has relied on x-ray for virtually all of its incremental radiation sterilization capacity since the merger; Steris's sterilization margins increased substantially after the merger; and a replication of Synergy's contemporaneous financial model undermines trial testimony that x-ray's projected returns were "woeful" and unlikely to support entry. Second, the article argues that the probability-centric approach to potential competition followed in Steris and other matters is flawed relative to an expected value approach that evaluates mergers based on both the probability of entry and the competitive significance of that entry.
This article questions how economics approaches notarial regulation through a review of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Product Market Regulation notarial regulatory indicator. After summarizing the literature on the economics of notaries, the article advances three critiques to guide the refinement of the current indicator and the design of a second regulatory commensuration. The first critique is conceptual. It shows that the indicator is built with a market-oriented perspective that associates regulation with a loss of competition. The article derives a best-practice model from the indicator and questions its economic consequences. Although this model defines a potential regulatory horizon for deregulation policies, it neither guarantees specific outcomes in terms of competition and quality nor clarifies the object it compares. The second critique is methodological. Although the indicator assumes continuity between competition and regulation, it fails in generating such continuity. Its construction implicitly over-weights the regulation of professional firms leading to inertia and limited variability, and overlooks several competition-damaging variables. The third critique regards policy implications. Through the comparison of two reforms of the notary profession, the Dutch Notary Act (1999) and the French 'Loi Macron' (2015), the article highlights the indicator's normative biases. Not only does the indicator favour deregulation over competition, but it also overlooks several welfare effects, including the costs of deregulation. Building on these three critiques, the article outlines guidelines for a more robust notarial regulatory indicator, and proposes an alternative benchmark for regulation based on professional functions.
In an effort to increase competition in digital markets, both the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Data Act (DA)-two landmark EU digital regulations-empower the European Commission to impose standards for the interoperability of digital services. In the case of the DMA, the Commission can, for instance, impose standards with respect to interoperability between messaging apps, and in the DA, standardization relates, for example, to interoperability between cloud services. In both cases, the European Commission can decide whether to delegate the standard setting to European Standardization Organizations (ESOs) or create its own standards. We note that standardization in that context differs from the contexts that ESOs have previously managed, because the adoption of the standard is not voluntary and firms have conflicting interests. Although an incumbent has a strong incentive to resist the emergence of a common standard, a rival firm would benefit from standardization-a scenario that we call 'adversarial standard setting'. In that new context, we analyze the feasibility of the Commission's possible approaches to standardization and compare their effectiveness in promoting competition and contestability in digital markets.
In a famous antitrust case, Appalachian Coals v. United States (1933), the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a joint sales agency of coal mining companies to begin operation. The defendants claimed and the Court agreed that they had no power or intent to raise coal prices. This article measures the agency's subsequent effect on its coal prices using an event-study design, with prices in other coal fields serving as controls. It finds that the agency had little effect immediately after the Court's decision in March, but by summer 1933, it was able to raise its prices over 20 percent.
Like any other piece of EU legislation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a multilingual legal instrument. However, its interpretation is often confined to the English-language discourse of competition law. This paper argues that this monolingual focus contradicts the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)’s fundamental principle of the equal authenticity of language versions, which states that no single language version should be relied upon in isolation. A key concept in the DMA’s regulatory framework is ‘fairness’, a notion that remains semantically elusive. Through a comparative linguistic analysis of nine of the official language versions of the DMA, this study reveals significant variability in how ‘fairness’ is translated. It suggests that these lexical choices reflect not only stylistic differences, but also distinct normative shifts towards notions of equity, honesty, or justice. Ultimately, this paper addresses a gap in the existing literature by providing a systematic, multilingual investigation. It posits that the autonomous and uniform application of the DMA requires a teleological interpretation that embraces linguistic diversity.
