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.
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.
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.