FTC Convenes Panel to Evaluate Competitive Effects of Petroleum Mergers

On January 14, 2005, the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") convened a panel of leading economic experts for a conference entitled "Estimating the Price Effects of Mergers and Concentration in the Petroleum Industry: An Evaluation of Recent Learning." The conference featured extensive discussions and analyses of two reports recently issued by the General Accounting Office ("GAO") and the FTC that reached conflicting conclusions about the competitive effects of oil industry mergers. The economists who participated in the conference were Dennis Carlton of the University of Chicago, Jerry Hausman of MIT, Ken Hendricks of the University of Texas, Scott Thompson of the Department of Justice, and Hal White of the University of California, San Diego.1