Frases para pensar

ABF/GBI Business: coordinated effects baked againAndrea Amelio, Pablo Asbo, Miguel de la Mano, Ruben Maximiano and Viktor Porubsky

What economic analysis has shown is that the concern should focus on the coordinated effects of the merger-specific change in the structure and dynamics of a market rather than solving the more prosaic dilemma of whether a merger is the triggering point for coordination (or collective dominance) which did not exist pre-merger, or whether it strengthens already existing collective dominance. The economic reality is more colourful: between black (coordination) and white (competition) there is something that could be called a sliding scale of coordination. When a market exhibits a certain degree of coordination, no matter whether this could already be described as collective dominance or not, the critical part of a merger analysis is to determine whether a merger creates a situation in which the coordination moves up the scale, to a higher degree.

My question: how do you know that the “higher degree” reached in the coordination scale is high enough to justify the prohibition of the concentration or a fine for tacit collusion?