Ex-Post Assessment of Merger Control Decisions in Digital Markets
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TAILORED SOLUTIONS IN ECONOMICS Ex-post Assessment of Merger Control Decisions in Digital Markets Final report Document prepared by Lear for the Competition and Markets Authority 9 May 2019 Lear Via di Monserrato, 48 00186 – Rome tel. +39 06 68 300 530 e-mail: [email protected] web: www.learlab.com AUTHORS Elena Argentesi, Lear and University of Bologna Paolo Buccirossi, Lear Emilio Calvano*, University of Bologna and Toulouse School of Economics Tomaso Duso, Lear, Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW Berlin), TU Berlin, CEPR, and CESifo Alessia Marrazzo, Lear Salvatore Nava, Lear OTHER CONTRIBUTORS Elena Salomone, Lear Anna Violini, Lear ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank the team at the Competition and Markets Authority for their assistance and guidance over the course of this study, including in particular Francesca Botti, Alistair Love and Tom Kitchen. Finally, we would like to thank Daniele Michele Ferrari (Lear) for his valuable research assistance. * Emilio Calvano was not involved in the assessment of the Facebook/Instagram merger. Lear – www.learlab.com Index Executive summary ....................................................................................................................... i Recommendations ..................................................................................................................... xiv PART I. General lessons for merger control in digital markets ........................................................ 1 I.1. Introduction and methodology for Part I ........................................................................................2 I.2. Survey of economic literature .........................................................................................................3 I.2.1. Direct and indirect network effects ....................................................................................................... 3 I.2.2. Markets for attention ............................................................................................................................ 6 I.2.3. Innovation in digital markets ................................................................................................................. 7 I.2.4. Market power, competition and big data ............................................................................................. 8 I.3. Overview of transactions carried out by digital companies ........................................................ 10 I.4. Past merger assessments in digital markets by competition authorities .................................... 21 I.4.1. Unilateral effects ToHs ........................................................................................................................ 23 I.4.2. Foreclosure ToHs ................................................................................................................................. 36 I.5. General lessons for the assessment of mergers in digital markets ............................................. 44 PART II. Case by case review of past merger decisions taken by UK Authorities ............................. 47 II.1. Introduction and methodology for Part II ................................................................................... 48 II.2. Facebook/Instagram ................................................................................................................... 51 II.2.1. Methodology assessment ................................................................................................................... 51 II.2.2. Market outcome assessment ............................................................................................................. 57 II.2.3. Conclusions on Facebook/Instagram .................................................................................................. 70 II.3. Google/Waze ............................................................................................................................... 72 II.3.1. Methodology assessment ................................................................................................................... 72 II.3.2. Market outcome assessment ............................................................................................................. 77 II.3.3. Conclusions on Google/Waze ............................................................................................................. 85 II.4. Priceline/Kayak and Expedia/Trivago .......................................................................................... 87 II.4.1. Methodology assessment ................................................................................................................... 88 II.4.2. Market outcome assessment ............................................................................................................. 92 II.4.3. Conclusions on Priceline/Kayak and Expedia/Trivago ...................................................................... 106 II.5. Amazon/The Book Depository .................................................................................................. 108 II.5.1. Methodology assessment ................................................................................................................. 108 II.5.2. Market outcome assessment ........................................................................................................... 112 II.5.3. Conclusions on Amazon/The Book Depository ................................................................................ 116 Lear – www.learlab.com II.6. Conclusions on case by case review .......................................................................................... 117 A. Survey of economic literature ................................................................................................ 119 B. List of past transactions ......................................................................................................... 142 C. Tag cloud analysis for acquisitions carried out by Amazon, Facebook and Google .................... 149 D. Case by case review: additional analyses and robustness checks ............................................ 152 E. Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 158 Lear – www.learlab.com List of tables Table I.1: Clusters for analysis of past acquisitions by Amazon, Facebook and Google ....................................... 11 Table I.2: List of cases included in review ............................................................................................................. 22 Table II.1: Top three referring sites for various OTAs ........................................................................................... 93 Table II.2: Percentage variation of Amazon prices for a large sample of books titles ........................................ 114 Table II.3: Percentage variation of Amazon prices over time for best-seller titles ............................................. 115 Table B.1: List of acquisitions made by Amazon ................................................................................................. 142 Table B.2: List of acquisitions made by Facebook ............................................................................................... 143 Table B.3: List of acquisitions made by Google ................................................................................................... 144 Table D.1: Example of Kayak’s results for the city of Blackpool .......................................................................... 154 Lear – www.learlab.com List of figures Figure I.1: Distribution of past acquisitions by cluster .......................................................................................... 12 Figure I.2: Number of acquisitions by Amazon over time ..................................................................................... 13 Figure I.3: Number of acquisitions by Facebook over time .................................................................................. 14 Figure I.4: Number of acquisitions by Google over time ...................................................................................... 15 Figure I.5: Distribution of acquisition by Amazon in Physical goods and services cluster .................................... 16 Figure I.6: Distribution of acquisition by Facebook in Communication apps and tools cluster ............................ 17 Figure I.7: Age distribution of Amazon’s targets ................................................................................................... 18 Figure I.8: Age distribution of Facebook’s targets ................................................................................................ 19 Figure I.9: Age distribution of Google’s targets .................................................................................................... 20 Figure I.10: Possible arrangements for the supply of ad intermediation and ad serving services ....................... 31 Figure II.1: Timeline of main Instagram’s changes ................................................................................................ 58 Figure II.2: Number of monthly unique users of social networks in the UK (million) ........................................... 62 Figure II.3: Share of monthly time spent on social networks in the UK (%) .........................................................