1.
The role of economists in merger
teams and qualitative evidence
review
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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
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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
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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
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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
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