Pass-through of commodity taxes depends on how well consumers know prices: well-informed consumers see the full tax in the prices they pay, poorly-informed ones see only part. The effect of competition on pass-through is non-monotonic in the number of sellers.
Whirlpool's acquisition of Maytag reduced consumer welfare by $271 million a year while preserving 797 domestic jobs. Each preserved job must be valued at more than $344,000 per year for the employment benefits to offset the consumer harm.
Mergers between domestic firms strengthen incentives to lobby for tariffs against foreign rivals, a trade-policy channel of merger harm that current antitrust ignores. In the Whirlpool–Maytag case, this channel nearly doubles the consumer harm from market power alone.
Mandatory price disclosure lowered fuel prices in Germany; the effect was larger when consumers were less informed, sellers were more numerous, and the policy was paired with a complementary information campaign.