Economic Analysis in Merger Investigations – Break-out Session 3 – The role of economists in merger teams and qualitative evidence review – UK – December 2020 OECD discussion
This presentation by the United Kingdom was prepared for the break-out Session 1, “The role of economists in merger teams and qualitative evidence review”, in the discussion “Economic Analysis in Merger Investigations” at the 19th OECD Global Forum on Competition on 9 December 2020. More papers and presentations on the topic can be found at http://oe.cd/eami.
This presentation was uploaded with the author’s consent.
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Economic Analysis in Merger Investigations – Break-out Session 3 – The role of economists in merger teams and qualitative evidence review – UK – December 2020 OECD discussion
1. The role of economists in merger
teams and qualitative evidence
review
1
OECD Global Forum for Competition
Ina Esser, Assistant Director of Economics, CMA
9 December 2020
2. Economists in merger teams
● Embedded in the case team and involved from
the very beginning of cases
● Economists play central role
- Assess how competition in a given industry works
- Formulate theories of harm and determine economic
frameworks to assess the merger
- Develop evidence-gathering strategy and undertake
assessment
- Assess strength of different pieces of evidence
2
3. Wider contribution of economists
● Developing the toolkit
- Increasing prominence of digital services and
technology products
• These kinds of markets are often characterised by particular
economic features
- Developing approaches for assessing competition in
dynamic markets and assessing potential competition
- Published revised Merger Assessment Guidelines for
consultation in November 2020
3
4. Qualitative evidence review
● Different types of qualitative evidence, including
internal documents and third-party views
● Different professions on a case team work closely
together
- Economists play an important role in requesting and
interpreting qualitative evidence
- Work by CMA’s Data, Technology and Analytics
(DATA) team on processing internal documents
4
5. Qualitative evidence in recent cases
● Tobii/Smartbox
- Customer views to assess closeness of competition
● Illumina/PacBio
- Assessing the likelihood and impact of innovation in the context
of uncertainty through internal documents
● Amazon/Deliveroo
- Using internal documents to assess incentives to re-enter in the
context of potential competition
● PayPal/iZettle
- Scrutinising evidence on deal valuation
5