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As part of its policy, advocacy, and research work, the Federal Trade Commission studies organizations and business practices to better understand their potential effect on competition and consumer protection.

The following studies are in progress or have been completed:

Merger Retrospective Program

The FTC also performs retrospective studies of consummated mergers to understand whether the agency’s threshold for bringing an enforcement action in a merger case has been too permissive, thus allowing too many potentially harmful mergers to go through. A second goal of the program is to assess the performance of tools agency economists use to prospectively predict the effects of proposed mergers.