The 2023 Merger Guidelines: Sharpening Merger Analysis

We discuss how the 2023 Merger Guidelines sharpen the tools, methods, and analyses that the Agencies use to evaluate mergers. We discuss the themes of the 2023 MG, and how the focus on evaluating competition, on the risk of harm, and on the burden shifting framework, encourage the Agencies to bring to bear a broader range of evidence and to interpret it using more intuitive and straightforward approaches. We then describe in detail how these themes have affected three analyses described in the g