Economics at the FTC: Estimating Harm from Deception and Analyzing Mergers

Abstract

Economists in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics perform economic analysis in support of the Commission’s dual missions to protect consumers and competition by preventing anticompetitive, deceptive, and unfair business practices through law enforcement, advocacy, and education. This article first presents summaries of analyses that FTC economists performed to estimate the consumer harm from two different types of deception that involved misleading information about lease terms and suppression of negative product reviews. The essay next turns to economic analyses of mergers: We first consider the vertical issues that arose in a semiconductor merger; and then we provide a discussion of how complementarity between hospitals may affect the analysis of hospital mergers.