Ulrich Schwalbe - Böcker

Law and Economics in European Merger Control provides a thorough introduction to the economic theory underlying the regulation of mergers. The central economic concepts of efficiency and welfare are introduced and their role in the foundations of competition law is explained. Market structures of perfect competition, monopoly and oligopoly are analysed and the methods for delineating and evaluating the effects of mergers on markets are explained.Having examined the economic context, the book then proceeds to offer an exhaustive analysis of the application of economic theory in the practice of merger regulation in Europe. Through an analysis of more than 300 competition cases the book critiques the current state of EC competition law against its economic aims, and offers views for the future development of the law. It also sets out an account of the European Commission's search for a 'more economic approach' to competition law, and analyses the policy's successes and failures.

The book studies the core of exchange and production economies in which agents are asymmetrically informed about states of nature. Information is modelled as part of the commodity space. When an agent joins a coalition, his information may change according to an information rule. It is shown that for exchange as well as for production economies - given that the production technology satisfies a regularity condition - the core is non-empty, i.e. even in the case of asymmetric information there exist allocations unblocked by any coalition.