Monopsony

CRA experts have brought clarity to monopsony issues across a variety of industries and provided economic advice and testimony for many alleged monopsony matters. We define product and geographic markets for the inputs or the services at issue and the output markets in which the inputs are used, as well as consider the role of differentiated products in those markets and the likelihood of entry by competing purchasers for those inputs/services.

Our experts excel in providing new insights into the economics of monopsony through cutting-edge analytics and innovative perspectives. For example, CRA experts have applied bargaining theory between buyers and sellers as an alternative to a more traditional monopsony model – yielding new information about the likely competitive impact of a buyer’s behavior.

CRA experts have opined on labor market practices such as no poach, no solicit, no hire, and noncompete agreements, whether they reduce information about job opportunities, restrict labor mobility, suppress wages, produce market power, and lead to monopsonization. We have also evaluated whether labor market effects are the result of horizontal agreements between competitors or vertical aspects of employment agreements.

In recent mergers, CRA experts have successfully addressed the DOJ and FTC’s concerns of potential labor effects in mergers (i.e., labor monopsony issues), leveraging their experience analyzing proprietary and publicly available data to evaluate the competitive effects of mergers in the labor market.