The 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines

Abstract

On June 30, 2020, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission replaced the 1984 Non-Horizontal Merger Guidelines with the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines (VMG). In the years between these two enforcement policy statements, there has been an avalanche of academic literature that addressed the antitrust law and economics of vertical integration, vertical mergers, and economically equivalent vertical contracts. To one extent or another, this burgeoning literature has informed the 2020 VMG. But have the new VMG gotten it right? This Special Issue will go a long way in answering that question. Some of the contributions offer an assessment of the 2020 VMG, while others contain analyses of economic issues that were prompted by the publication of the VMG.