Assessing the Quality of Competition Policy: The Case of Horizontal Merger Enforcement

This article suggests how a jurisdiction might best go about evaluating the quality of its competition policy system. It urges that competition agencies and collateral institutions strive to improve the ability to measure the economic effects of merger control and to verify the consequences of different approaches to enforcement. The article uses merger control in the United States as its main illustration, but the article's observations apply to other areas of competition policy oversight, as well. The article seeks to encourage the recent trend within the global competition policy community of accepting a norm that focuses greater attention on the evaluation of the economic effects of enforcement decisions-especially by developing better quantitative measures of actual economic effects-and the assessment of the processes by which competition agencies examine individual transactions.