Not All Network Effects Are Red Flags: A Simple Screen for Digital Vertical Mergers

1. Keeper Acquisitions: What Big Tech Keeps When It Buys Selçukhan Ünekbas

   The “killer acquisition” hypothesis dominates debate on technology mergers, asking whether large firms buy startups to eliminate them. But the more revealing question is what acquirers keep.

2. Dominance in Motion: A practical R&D-intensity test for dynamic markets Jorge Padilla

   In innovation-driven markets, a market share records who is ahead; it does not reveal how hard that firm must work to remain ahead. A dominance assessment should therefore examine the incumbent’s innovation effort and the…

3. Introducing The Minerva Papers Jorge Padilla

   Why this title? Among the gods of antiquity, Minerva has suffered a peculiar fate. Mars still lends his name to war, Venus to beauty and desire, Mercury to speed and commerce.

4. The Law and Economics of Superior Bargaining Power Giuseppe Colangelo

   The abuse of economic dependence has attracted renewed attention, largely as a result of the growing policy focus on fairness in digital markets.

5. Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Assessing the Draft EU Merger Guidelines Jorge Padilla

   This paper assesses the European Commission’s draft Merger Guidelines against the treatment of efficiencies, the failing firm defence, and the counterfactual in the 2004 Horizontal Merger Guidelines and the 2008 Non-Horizontal…

6. A Farewell to Net Neutrality: Implications for Internet Access and E-Commerce Daniel F. Spulber

   I consider legal decisions resulting in the end of the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality regulation. There is evidence that net neutrality regulation has diminished incentives to invest in internet access and…

7. Antitrust Antidote: April-June 2026 Jeremy Kauffman, Jeremy Sandford, Nathan Wilson and Koren W. Wong-Ervin

   There were a number of significant decisions from April through June 2026, including: (1) the Eastern District of California’s preliminary injunction in In re Nexstar-Tegna Merger Litigation, requiring hold-separate relief…

Editorial board

Anupam Chander, William E. Kovacic, Catalina Goanta, Daniel Crane, David Bosco, A. Douglas Melamed, Frédéric Jenny, Giovanni Dosi, Godefroy de Boiscuillé, Herbert Hovenkamp, Howard Shelanski, Jason Potts, Jonathan Barnett, Katherine J. Strandburg, Koren W. Wong-Ervin, Mariateresa Maggiolino, Michal Shur-Ofry, Nicolas Petit, Nuno Cunha Rodrigues, Pinar Akman, Randal C. Picker, Richard Langlois, Sofia Ranchordás, Thomas Nachbar, Volker Stocker.