Ex-post Assessment of Merger Remedies

Roundtable

Date: 8 December 2023

About

Merger control is an important part of any competition regime, and effective merger remedies are needed to ensure its efficacy. Remedies are a distinct process within merger control and represent a number of specific challenges that warrant careful consideration, including how remedies are designed as well as how they are implemented. Ex-post assessments of merger remedies allow competition authorities to look retrospectively at previous merger remedy decisions to review whether the remedy proceeded as expected or if things could have gone better. This enables competition authorities to refine and improve their practices and be confident in their decision making going forward.

In December 2023, the OECD Global Forum on Competition considered several aspects of ex-post assessments of merger remedies, including reviews that consider the implementation of the remedy as well as those that consider its design. It also discussed the need for them in competition authorities’ toolkits, and how best to implement them effectively according to the resources available.

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Key takeaways from the roundtable

It is important that merger remedies are effective and ex-post assessments allow authorities to learn from experience and improve their practices. Other benefits of ex-post assessments of merger remedies can be to increase the credibility of an authorities work and allow them to demonstrate what does, or does not, work to a wider audience.
There is no “one size fits all” approach for ex-post assessments of merger remedies. Low cost methodologies still produce useful insights, although methodologies should fit the objective of the assessment and desired robustness of findings.
To aid further ex-post assessments of merger remedies, authorities could be given appropriate legal powers to gather information. The remedy process itself may also have the potential to be used to collect data through the imposition of reporting requirements.
Finally, many of the lessons from ex-post assessments are valuable to others and more could be done to ensure the learnings are shared with the wider competition community.