Analysis Group Responds to European Commission’s Consultation on Draft Merger Guidelines

Dr. Chapsal is an economist who specializes in empirical and theoretical industrial organization. He has provided economic expertise in a large number of high-profile cases involving mergers, cartels, information exchanges, abuses of dominant positions, regulation, intellectual property matters, and damages quantifications. Recent examples include the Lafarge/Holcim and Fnac/Darty mergers, as well as airfreight, cathode ray tube, and elevator cartel cases. Dr. Chapsal has also assisted various firms in designing optimized pricing strategies and dealing with policy issues. His reports have been presented to the competition authorities of France, Germany, Austria, and South Africa; the European Commission; the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf; and the Court of Appeals, Conseil d’Etat, Conseil constitutionnel, and Tribunal of Commerce of Paris.

Prior to joining Analysis Group, Dr. Chapsal founded MAPP, a Paris- and Brussels-based economic consultancy, which was acquired by KPMG in 2018. Previously, he worked in a US competition economics consultancy. Dr. Chapsal regularly publishes articles on competition economics, on subjects ranging from the econometric analysis of cartels to geographic market delineation and exclusionary strategies. He is an affiliated professor at the Sciences Po Department of Economics and a member of the CESifo academic research network.

Dr. Frot is an economist with specialized expertise in applying quantitative analyses to competition, litigation, regulatory, and business intelligence issues. He advises firms in a wide range of industries, providing economic and econometric expertise on matters related to mergers, market concentrations, cartel investigations, and damages.

Over the years, he has performed numerous economic and econometric analyses in Phase I and Phase II mergers before the French Competition Authority and the European Commission, including Veolia Transport/Transdev, Jardiland/InVivo, Castel/Patriarche, Fnac/Nature & Découvertes, d’aucy/Triskalia, Lactalis/Nuova Castelli, Lactalis/Leerdammer, CMA CGM / Bolloré Logistics, Canal+/OCS, and Suez/Veolia. He has led case teams and performed economic analyses in several prominent horizontal and vertical cartel cases, as well as estimated damages in antitrust litigation and intellectual property matters. He has also assisted companies in modeling and implementing changes to pricing behavior.

His reports have been presented to the European Commission, the French Competition Authority, the Court of Appeals, the Conseil d’État (France’s highest administrative court), the Tribunal of Commerce of Paris, and regulators in the telecommunications, energy, transportation, and gambling sectors. Dr. Frot has published a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals and regularly speaks at international competition law and policy conferences.

Dr. Hariton specializes in the application of industrial organization and competition economics to merger control, antitrust and competition, state aid, and regulatory matters, including extensive work in large-scale merger investigations and competition litigation before the European Commission and national competition authorities. He previously served as an economist at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP). Dr. Hariton has advised on more than 75 merger reviews, including those of Halliburton/Baker Hughes, Dow/DuPont, Bayer/Monsanto, and Salesforce/Slack by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as antitrust cases involving Intel, Servier, and Glaxo Wellcome. His experience includes work on state aid, damages estimation, and regulatory proceedings, as well as work on Digital Services Act fee challenges and foreign subsidies regulation. Dr. Hariton also brings distinctive expertise as a forensic IT expert, having assisted in multiple inspections and investigations. He has published in journals including the Review of Industrial Organization, the Journal of Public Economic Theory, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Revue Économique, and Recherches Économiques de Louvain, and has contributed to European Commission consultations and newsletters. Dr. Hariton previously served as an assistant professor at Toulouse Business School and as a research fellow at UCLouvain.

Dr. Régibeau, the former chief competition economist at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP), is an expert in industrial organization, with a particular focus on technology-intensive industries, intellectual property (IP) rights, and competition policy. His areas of specialty include the economics of digital platforms and innovation, vertical restraints and abuse of dominance, and international trade. His consulting experience includes advising on a wide variety of cases before courts and competition authorities throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia.

Dr. Régibeau has held teaching and research positions at institutions that include the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and a number of European universities. He has published extensively in leading journals and was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Industrial Economics. For more than a decade, he has taught a course on the intersection of IP rights and competition policy at the CRESSE Summer School on Competition Policy and Regulation. Dr. Régibeau has also served as a member of the Economic Advising Group on Competition Policy at the European Commission.

Dr. Van Audenrode is an expert in data analysis and econometrics, labor economics, antitrust and competition policy, and public economics. He has consulted to clients - including law firms and government agencies - in Canada, the US, and Europe. Dr. Van Audenrode’s work includes developing a methodology to value desktop software; he also developed expertise valuing goods as varied as restaurant franchises, executive stock options, or smartphone features. His recent work in public economics includes evaluating the economic rent from hydroelectricity to the Canadian economy and the value of logging rights on the ancestral territory of a Canadian First Nation. In the area of labor economics, his work has included filing an expert report assessing fair compensation for Quebec provincial judges and Quebec prosecutors and advising Quebec’s commission on pay equity. Dr. Van Audenrode has filed expert reports in courts in the US, Canada, Belgium, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, and has testified in Canada and the US. He recently filed a report with the Amsterdam Court of Appeal in support of the settlement reached between Ageas and claimant organizations in the Fortis case, the largest settlement ever reached through the Dutch Collective Settlement Act (WCAM). Dr. Van Audenrode’s scientific research and articles have been published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and trade journals. He is a coauthor of the book The Mutual Fund Industry: Competition and Investor Welfare, and is a frequent presenter at industry and academic conferences.

Mr White is a consulting and testifying economist who specialises in applying microeconomics and sophisticated econometric modelling to complex litigation and merger-related questions, primarily in matters involving the health care, financial services and technology industries. He has supported clients in various jurisdictions and industries in follow-on competition damages litigation, assessing overcharge, upstream and downstream pass-on and volume effects. He has served as a testifying expert in the UK Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber), the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal and the Amsterdam District Court on competition cases.

Mr White has supported high-profile companies with complex merger reviews across multiple jurisdictions, including in the Veolia/Suez, LVMH/Tiffany, Sika/MBCC and Eutelsat/OneWeb mergers. He has also provided evidence to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the European Commission (EC), including on behalf of clients involved in cartel investigations, abuse of dominance investigations and mergers. Mr White has also provided support to European financial and competition regulators in coordinated conduct investigations.

Mr White has extensive experience addressing competition and intellectual property (IP) issues in matters related to cutting-edge pharmaceutical products and FRAND licensing questions. As part of this work, he has supported a number of scientific and technical experts in front of courts and regulatory bodies. He also regularly supports pharmaceutical clients on competition issues around market access, pricing, denigration and competition from generic manufacturers.

Mr White has worked in a number of jurisdictions, including the UK, the European Union, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Belgium and the US. His writing has been published in an array of journals, including the Journal of European Competition Law & Practice, the Competition Law Journal and the Journal of Antitrust Enforcement, and he regularly speaks at international competition law and policy conferences.