Not All Pre-Emptive Mergers Are Alike: A Classification of Recent Cases

We present a typology of cases involving mergers that could be viewed as eliminating future competition, motivated by recent debates in the antitrust literature about mergers that pose this kind of competitive threat. The different types of cases are distinguished by whether one or both firms have products that are on the market, and whether the nature and future competitive impact of products in development are clear. We show how these distinctions affect the types of economic evidence that can