Recent Advances in Economic Methodology for Coordinated Effects

Coordinated effects have come to play a smaller role in merger enforcement over time. Antitrust agencies now tend to focus on unilateral effects allegations with coordinated effects playing at most a supporting role. This could be due to the popularization of merger simulation and other methodologies to estimate unilateral effects and, until recently, the lack of similar quantitative tools for coordinated effects. This article argues two main points. First, economic theory does not always justif