Market Delineation under the Merger Guidelines: Monopoly Cases and Alternative Approaches

Despite the well-known Cellophane fallacy, the Merger Guidelines' market-delineation paradigm, which examines the effects of price increases above the prevailing level, has substantial utility in many monopoly cases. For monopoly cases in which the Guidelines' approach is not appropriate due to the Cellophane fallacy, no modification of that approach appears to solve the problem is a useful way. More direct methods for assessing monopoly power are likely to be preferable to structural analysis in many monopoly and merger cases.