Philipp Tillmann

An Analysis Group team led by Managing Principals Emily Cotton and Rebecca Kirk Fair and Vice President Philipp Tillmann was retained on behalf of Campbell Soup Company in connection with its proposed $2.7 billion acquisition of Sovos Brands, owner of several premium grocery brands.

Analysis Group was retained on behalf of German live entertainment and ticketing service provider CTS Eventim AG & CO. KGaA (CTS Eventim) and FNAC Darty, a French online retailer of consumer electronic products, in connection with an investigation by the European Commission of the proposed merger between the parties.

Analysis Group was retained by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan on behalf of Shareholder Representative Services (SRS), the plaintiff designated by former stockholders of Syntimmune, in a breach of contract litigation brought against two major pharmaceutical companies.

In recent years, regulators and other interested parties have advocated for increased attention to non-price effects of mergers, particularly when data is a key input but not the main product of the merging parties. In these mergers, economic analysis has sometimes shown that the resulting combined datasets may have an adverse impact on competition or consumer welfare. In “Is Data ‘The New Oil’? Non-Price Effects of Mergers in Data-Intensive Industries,” an article published in CPI Antitrust Chronicle, three Analysis Group consultants analyze these non-price effects and their potential consequences for competition.

In the article, Managing Principals Emily Cotton and Rebecca Kirk Fair and Vice President Philipp Tillmann examine three topics that antitrust authorities and industry observers have raised as particularly concerning with respect to anticompetitive effects: potential entrenchment, data privacy, and potential foreclosure from data inputs. The authors discuss both the potential effects of these topics and remind readers that investigations into their impacts should consider not only anticompetitive aspects but the potential gains in quality, data security and privacy, and production efficiencies from such mergers.

Compared to other jurisdictions, such as the US, economic expert reports have only relatively recently become commonplace in determining follow-on damages in German cartel proceedings. In his article in the Global Private Litigation Committee’s December 2023 newsletter, published by the American Bar Association Antitrust Law Section, Analysis Group Vice President Philipp Tillmann summarizes changes being debated in the German antitrust community over how German courts could make more effective use of such expert reports.

Dr. Tillmann discusses concerns related to the cost and organization of proceedings, objective standards for expert reports, and how to manage experts’ divergent conclusions. He also outlines several proposed solutions, including relying on court-appointed economists, adopting common standards for experts and their reports, bundling small claims to allow for true class actions, and utilizing specialized courts to handle antitrust matters.

In “Economic Evidence and Modern Antitrust,” published in CPI Antitrust Chronicle, Managing Principals Rebecca Kirk Fair and Emily Cotton and Manager Philipp Tillmann examine the question of how to make the best use of economic evidence for assessments of antitrust matters in the digital age. They provide examples from legislative, agency investigations and merger reviews, and court activity to underscore the continuing importance of economic evidence and the relevance of the consumer welfare standard. They also discuss the appropriate application of specific economic tools and analytics to address antitrust issues.

Analysis Group Vice President Dov Rothman and Managers David Toniatti and Philipp Tillmann have published an article in the Journal of Competition Law & Economics examining the implications of production constraints for the pass-through of cost changes.

In “The Economics of Pass-Through With Production Constraints,” the authors consider production technology that can only be adjusted in discrete intervals and/or is costly to adjust.

They demonstrate that, because of such production constraints, a firm may not pass on small changes in costs to its customers.

The authors suggest that this result has important implications for antitrust litigation – for example, the extent to which overcharges resulting from anticompetitive conduct upstream in the supply chain are passed through to purchasers downstream.