ON THE CONSISTENCY OF MERGER POLICY

This paper presents a way to get around the information problem facing outside analysts who want to scrutinize competition authorities' deci sions. A formal model of how decisions are taken is applied to infer i nformation that is available to the authorities but not to the outside analyst. If the information thus inferred from several decisions is i ncompatible, it is claimed that the policy executed by the competition authorities is inconsistent. A case study is presented of two recent decisions by the Norwegian Competition Authority on proposed mergers i n the Norwegian insurance industry, indicating they most likely were m utually inconsistent.