This issue marks the 22nd year of a special feature of the Review of Industrial Organization: “Antitrust and Regulatory Update”. As was true in recent years, I asked the Chief Economists of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division (DOJ), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the DG Competition of the European Union (DGComp), and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of the UK to write essays about the interesting aspects of the important antitrust and regulatory issues that confronted their agencies during this past year. I am pleased to report that all five agencies responded affirmatively.

The essays in this issue of the Review – all of them co-authored among the career economists at their respective agencies – are thus the products of these five affirmative responses.

As has been reflected in previous years’ essays from the competition agencies, mergers (which, of course, include acquisitions) and merger policy continue to be important, and all five of the essays discuss one or more mergers that were addressed by their agencies. Market definition is prominent: The DOJ discusses its challenge to the proposed Penguin Random House acquisition of Simon & Schuster, where the relevant market was for a major input to publishing – “anticipated top-selling books” – and thus involved potential monopsony power; the DOJ also discusses its challenge to Booz Allen Hamilton’s acquisition of EverWatch. The CMA analyzes Meta’s proposed acquisition of GIPHY. DGComp discusses a merger that involved gasoline retailing (along with some vertical elements) in Slovenia, in which the determinants of the catchment areas for the retailers was important. Spatial markets are also addressed in the FTC’s analysis of mergers among veterinary hospitals. And the FCC analyzes a merger between two providers of satellite-based broadband services.

DGComp’s investigation of Amazon and the DOJ’s and FTC’s discussion of labor market competition and non-compete clauses address a number of other antitrust issues. Broad market studies are described by the CMA: for supermarket pricing and for road fuels.

Wider regulatory issues are addressed by a number of the essays: The FCC, for example, discusses the establishment of the “988 Suicide & Crisis Hotline” program. And the FTC writes about the regulatory (“rulemaking”) process and its application to the FTC’s proposed prohibition on most non-compete clauses in employers’ contracts with employees.

This brief summary cannot, of course, do adequate justice to the interesting analyses and discussions that are to be found in all five essays in this issue; but I hope that I have sufficiently stimulated the curiosity and interest of readers so as to encourage them to read the complete essays. As has been true in past years, RIO readers will find that reading these essays at greater length will be well worth their time.