Turning the Coin: A Competition Model to Evaluate Mergers

Some mergers are so complex that antitrust authorities and courts are probably very tempted to decide by flipping a coin. In this paper I try to reconcile the economic approach to the evaluation of mergers with the one employed in other sciences to study the competitive interaction among different powers. By demonstrating the existence of a very strong and hidden link between the Antitrust Logit Model (ALM) and the competition models based on differential equations, I claim that scholars of different fields have studied the two sides of the same coin. I suggest that some help to Antitrust authorities could come from the tools used in natural sciences by turning this coin, instead of flipping it.