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Examines the pioneering work of the European Commission, with the support of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the European Court of First Instance (ECFI), to apply the merger control of regulation (MCR) to situations of collective as well as to single dominance. Reveals that the Commission first applied the notion of collective dominance in the Nestlé Perrier merger in 1992 but that the legality of this practice was questionable, given that the express wording of the MCR does not mention the notion. The legal challenge arose from the takeover of Mitteldeutsche Kali AG by Kali und Salz with the landmark judgment favouring the stance of the Commission – the MCR does encompass situations of collective dominance. Examines why the court reached this decision, particularly given that the Advocate General’s opinion was exactly the opposite.

This study aims to test the authors’ theory that in an integrated sales team, the larger team (either from the acquiring or acquired firm) dominates the smaller team, even though it may be less competent than the smaller one, and that the level of competence of the integrated entity with the dominant but inferior larger team is bound to deteriorate.

The study tests the theory by conducting a laboratory experiment.

The results from the experiment show that an asymmetrical employee composition structure creates merger dominance in the post-integration group and influences the integration performance.

Considering the lack of mergers and acquisitions research in the marketing literature, the author believes that this study contributes new information to the literature. The finding that an integrated entity with a dominant but inferior larger partner will demonstrate a resulting degeneration of competence invites empirical research for validation.

The integration of sales teams is central to ensuring revenue growth and driving the value that mergers promise but often fail to realize. The study findings provide some practical insights in this regard.

Mergers between asymmetrical partners are common phenomena. However, few studies have investigated how an unequal size of sales teams in pre-merger firms influences the effective integration of different sales teams. To fill this research gap, this study examines whether the involvement of an unequal number of salespeople from pre-merger firms in a post-merger sales team may influence its post-merger performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role that pre-merger identification plays within a post-merger setting. Social Identity Theory (SIT) has conflicting reports on the role that pre-merger identification plays in post-merger integration. The current research explores a case study where enhancing pre-merger identification resulted in positive post-merger identification and intergroup relations; progressing knowledge in the field by analysing the contextual factors that facilitate this outcome.

The research follows a case study design applying integration method for the study of changes over time. Two sets of in-depth semi-structured interviews underwent content analysis to derive thematic findings. Case detail was also provided to frame the results.

Findings of the research showed that the integration strategy used to facilitate pre-merger ingroup identification reduced the perceived status differences between groups, moderately improved ingroup relations, and significantly improved intergroup relations.

For strategic planners involved in managing change during a merger, the findings provide an alternative integration strategy to be used within a joint-brand structure. The research also provides several analysis points that managers can use to design appropriate integration strategies.

The findings are important for the application of SIT to mergers and acquisitions, which commonly view pre-merger identification as a barrier to integration. The current study outlines the contextual factors which strengthen the relationship between pre-merger identity and post-merger identification.

This chapter reviews the key results obtained in previous studies of airline mergers. It is found that the effect of mergers on airfares is dependent on the network configurations of merging airlines. Fare increases are frequently observed on overlapped routes. However, if the networks of two merging airlines are complementary, the expanded network after the merger leads to cost savings, increase in travel options, and improvement in service quality. Therefore, in a deregulated market, with few entry barriers, relaxing merger regulations is likely to improve welfare. However, most welfare evaluations do not incorporate quality changes or dynamic competition effects. Empirical investigations are primarily ex post analysis of mergers that have already passed antitrust reviews. The relationship between market concentration and welfare might be nonlinear and market specific. Therefore, airline mergers and alliances should be reviewed case by case. Methodological improvements are needed in future studies to control for the effects of complicating factors inherent in ex post evaluations.

The jurisprudence concerning the regulation of mergers and acquisitions in the Indian context, from the perspective of competition law, is vast. Mergers and acquisitions in India have been regulated by the Indian Companies Act, the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act and several sector specific legislations. After their notification in June 2011, Ss. 5 and 6 of the Competition Act read with the Combination Regulations of 2011 is the primary law that currently governs this field. In this paper, the authors, using a comparative perspective, analyse whether the present legal regime is effective in tackling the problems associated with regulating mergers in the Indian and international context. These problems include identifying the appropriate market definition, devising an effective test to weed out mergers that cause an “appreciable adverse competition”, understanding the roles of the multiple sector‐specific regulatory bodies, inter alia. It is concluded that the present regime does not deal with several of these important concerns.

The approach is both analytical and comparative. This paper provides an in‐depth study of a recent development in the law relating to mergers and acquisitions in India, which has cross‐border implications.

The paper shows that the application of Ss. 5 and 6 of the Indian Competition Act has serious flaws which need to be ironed out.

As the notification is recent, there is no substantive writing in the field. This paper bridges that gap. Also, this paper provides comparative perspectives, juxtaposing the Indian regime with the US and EU regimes where applicable.

This paper seeks to investigate the effect of the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) merger on the market for audit services in the UK. To this end a “what if” analysis is conducted comparing estimated outcomes prior to the merger with those expected under post‐merger conditions. Particular attention is given to the effect of the merger on the relative performance of the top tier and non‐top tier audit firms.

The paper employs a Markov chain model to estimate the long‐term market shares of audit firms' pre‐merger and post‐merger. Concurrently, an optimisation model is employed to generate parameters reflecting the relative attractiveness of audit firms and the probability that a client company continues with the current audit firm.

Prior to the PwC merger, this model would predict a large reduction in the share of the non‐Big Six from 17 per cent to a long run 7 per cent. However, the effect of the PwC merger appears to be that the position of the non‐Big Five has been improved and the model predicts a slight increase in long‐term market share to 18 per cent.

The Markov model employed makes a number of assumptions that may restrict the generality of the implications that can be drawn from the analysis.

The results show that, contrary to the worries of the competition authorities, the long‐term impact of the PwC merger, ceteris paribus, would be to improve the position of the non‐top tier of auditing firms.

Auditor concentrations studies have been mostly descriptive. This paper reports an analytical study of the potential effect of audit mergers on market concentration.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how executives can rapidly gain employee acceptance for strategic change through reciprocal sensegiving. The author draw on a processual case study of a transformational European merger to study this question, highlighting the properties of reciprocity in making sense of urgent strategic change, then developing them through the lens of a gift exchange.

The author draws on several qualitative methods to study sensegiving and sensemaking processes in Alpha and Beta from 2011 to 2014: insider-outsider team meetings at the beginning, mid-way and at the end of the merger integration process, ethnographic field notes during a four-month research internship, one focus group meeting with Alpha and Beta managers after the announcement of the redistribution of managerial positions, interviews with a carefully selected sample of top and middle managers, participant observation in key sensegiving meetings with top managers and “custodians,” triangulation with secondary data from the database Factiva, and finally follow-up insider corroboration of the findings by the research intern who took up a management position at Alpha in 2014.

Likening executive and employee sensegiving to a gift-giving and gift-returning exchange, the author elucidates how executives induce employees to quickly “give in” to strategic change imperatives. the author single out the key third party role of custodians of reciprocity in the mechanism, using the metaphor of the Trojan horse to illustrate its executive use and point to the underexplored darker side of prosocial sensegiving dynamics.

Further research should clarify the long-term advantages and disadvantages of the mechanism. The Trojan horse mechanism possibly sacrifices long-term reciprocity for short-term purposes. Following the example of executives in this case study, use of the Trojan horse mechanism should be followed by attention to socio-political balance concerns, including new procedures that clarify the link between value creation aims and employees’ collective contribution. Without such a cohesion-building exercise, employees’ feelings of procedural injustice may build up, resulting in negative reciprocity in subsequent change projects.

The work indicates that a leader’s visionary credentials are not the main source of her norm-shaping power in a project of urgent strategic change. Visionary credentials are welcomed by the dominant group of employees as long as they are framed as a symbolic management exercise that will not substantially impact socio-political balance. Substantively, employees make sense of the justice of urgent strategic change primarily through the lens of custodians and their “power from the past.”

All in all, executives should use the Trojan horse mechanism sparingly, in contexts of urgent strategic change and institutionalized employee behavior. Working with sources and voices of resistance from lower levels of management is more likely to yield symbiotic integration benefits.

Applied to the problem of rapid strategic change in a non-crisis context, the Trojan horse mechanism is a solution to the question: how can executives avoid lengthy socio-political confrontations and quickly induce employee ownership of painful strategic changes?

This chapter combines a global value chain methodology with the case of the development of the farmed Atlantic salmon industry in Chile to inform discussions regarding the globalization of economy and society. The research documents the shifting structure of the value chain from the north to the south as Chile replaced northern Europe as the locus of production and the major world supplier of farmed Atlantic salmon. Farmed salmon was supported by the Chilean state as part of its export-oriented industrialization model that attracted foreign direct investment (FDI) from northern TNCs. Chile's low costs of production combined with growing environmental problems in the north and global retailers' demand for large quantities of low-cost product resulted in the restructuring of the farmed Atlantic-salmon value chain as northern capital sourced the south as a lucrative production platform to service northern consumers. A detailed investigation of the rise in dominance of the firm Marine Harvest is provided to illustrate the process of industry concentration the Chilean farmed-salmon industry. This model has generated a legitimation crisis related to environmental degradation and labor abuses resulting in social movement organization both nationally and internationally. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the Wal-Mart Effect on the agrifood industry in particular and in the farmed-salmon industry in particular.

The key to successful mergers lies not only in careful attention to organizational structure and strategy, but in human resource programs and internal communications as well.