School of Econ’s Weinberg Wins Best Paper Award

Matthew Weinberg, an assistant professor at LeBow’s School of Economics, has won the Robert F. Lanzillotti Prize for best paper in antitrust economics presented at the International Industrial Organization’s Conference, held recently in Boston, Mass., for a working paper he is co-authoring titled “Mergers Facilitate Tacit Collusion: Empirical Evidence From the U.S. Brewing Industry.”

Weinberg, along with co-author Nate Miller of Georgetown University, looked into changes in beer prices since the MillerCoors merger, and found that they went up across the board, not only among MillerCoors’ products, but also Anheuser-Busch/InBev products. “When we attempted to apply economic theory to explain the price change, we find that a model with collusion between the combined Miller/Coors and ABI, their closest remaining competitor, best explained the price movements in the data.”

Weinberg says this research is important because our understanding of how mergers change competition is imperfect, and that this research provides evidence that mergers can raise prices beyond what standard models predict.

The International Industrial Organization’s Conference is an annual conference that will be held here at Drexel University in 2016.